It is a while since i did a resources post. I meant to do them regularly, but, well…
this one, is a bit of a plea for help really. SB wants to learn italian. she wants it to be fun/enjoyable, progress through rather than stop when she can say her name, and have a fairly intuitive standalone core resource and then some fun peripherals.
for example, in french we use galore park french, which she says is fine, tho a bit ‘dry’ and she is happy ‘getting on with it. ALongside it is skoldo french – but currently she is on the last book. she likes this one far more though. They both have spanish versions, but no italian. for the audio, we use collins french mostly. alongside this we have bought loads and loads of different bilingual books, which she reads aloud, or i share with her. On the whole, this works [or would if we actually did it more regularly...]
I would like something similar in italian, and we have a lot of false starts.
these for example: [the collins mindmap just doesn't work for her, and contatti is something you need to do audio and book at the same time it seems, rather than listen to the audio to help with the book or vice versa - tho i think we could use this better - i might have to 'play' with it.]
so it seems, that actually what we probably want is something she can do as a ‘workbook’ and something that she can do as ‘in car audio’ ideally they would tie together, but would be used separately [no book in the car, no audio doing the workbook] and some fun books and peripherals. We have a kids italian cd – which she has really enjoyed, but stops there, it doesn’t progress on – which is a shame, we need vols 2 and 3! And we have found an italian ‘workbook’ [which i have 2 copies of - doh!] which she seems to like. but this isn’t ‘all joined up’ and i am sure there is something better out there…
please help me through the muddle of resources 
needs to be something she can do on her own – she is quite self driven, that i can help with if required. I speak NO italian, so does need to be something that we can work out rather than in italian only! I am desperate [and don't want to add more resources to my not what we wanted pile!]
thankyou
[links are amazon affiliate, feel free to put affiliate in comments for me to click ]
I’ll have more to add, but I think what I would look for at the moment is a podcast or a series of you tube videos. It’s free, you could download the podcast to your phone and listen in the car and then watch the videos later. I came across this one https://www.youtube.com/user/italianpod101 which has about 150 videos on so plenty to have a try with.
Having completely ignored podcasts in the past few years I’m finding loads of good stuff on there. Fairy tales in italian, radio programmes, and loads of language courses, you could try lots of them. You might find some that have extras you can buy on their site.
Maybe also look at the Practise Makes Perfect workbooks? I’m using the Basic Spanish one myself and M & A could do it too if they wanted, but they aren’t self directed kids really.
We’re really enjoying the mish mash of different things we do. We’re doing GP Spanish, but like SB think it is a little dry. So for us we also read aloud from a picture book, listen to podcasts – some teaching, some immersion. We watch kids programmes a lot from you tube, sometimes watching uk version first then spanish. The kids do a spanish class too but really that’s not teaching them much extra words, but is hopefully helping with confidence in actually speaking.
Wah, that was quite an epic comment for a start!
an epic comment kirsty
v helpful tho, had never thought of podcasts on youtube. brilliant idea 
thanks
I like them because they’re free
Oh and they don’t take up space on my bookshelves!!
A few links….
http://www.sunderlandschools.org/mfl-sunderland/resources-italian.htm
http://www.childrenslibrary.org/icdl/SimpleSearchCategory?ids=&pnum=1&cnum=1&text=&lang=English&ilangcode=en&ilang=English&langid=63
http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/italian/
http://www.junior.rai.it/dl/junior/junior.htm
Also an idea I saw was Disney Topolino comics (mickey mouse in italian afaik) – there is one on ebay… http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/sis.html?_nkw=topolino+comics
Now, to see if this comment posts or is flagged!!
a proper google
thankyou kirsty
I had Contatti (did Italian at adult Ed class for a term – was supposed to be 2 terms but I was bored as it was so slow so gave up) and I think we used the book and tapes separately as well as together. There’s the usborne beginners book and audio too – I found I got on much better with the Welsh version if I just listened to the cd and didn’t bother trying to read it as well, lol, so we had that in the car for quite a while. What’s on the bbc site? Anything like Mi Vida Loca for Italian?
I’m not clear whether you have the italian for children cd set you’ve linked to. We have it if you’d like to have a look at it.
We have Italian games too, must get them out.
yes, we do have it – and accidentally 2 of the yellow workbook one – sigh! but at least we like both of them. thankyou for all the ideas
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