Reading with the Sharmas

This link arrived as a forward on an old friends' WhatsApp group. On their YouTube channel, a desi guy from Mumbai, and his American wife, living in St Louis, USA, are reading children's story books, sentence by sentence - in English and in Hindi. These simple tales for kids, animatedly narrated by Vikas and Kait Sharma have my kids immediately hooked.

The couple who go by the screen name Mr & Mrs Sharma, have day jobs. Vikas is a software consultant and his wife is a special education teacher for children in kindergarten to grade five. The idea for a bilingual bedtime project stemmed from Kait creating e-learning plans for her students during the lockdown. Since there are several Indian families at the school she teaches, she felt that such bilingual videos would offer a suitable mix of cultures and make American classics accessible to foreigners.

My six-year-old son and five-year-old daughter started with Go Away Big Green Monster by Ed Emberley; while Kait looks more comfortable with the camera, we sense a slight hesitation on Vikas' part, which he soon overcomes it with his lively expressions and Hindi words like daanav and not bhoot for monster or daravna for scary. In Ten Shiny Snails by Ruth Galloway, we had no clue that snails were called ghoghen in Hindi, so perhaps it is a great way to brush up on our own Hindi. It's a counting book, so my younger one had more fun listening to this. So far, we've read five books with the Sharmas and we like how the videos are simple with no fancy fringes (sounds, for instance) attached. Just like the good-old-fashioned way of storytelling.

Interestingly, all the books they read are considered classics in the United States; though we may not have heard of these tales in India. There are usually one to two sentences per page; the pictures are colourful and expressive, and the language is simple. Obviously, bilingual reading cannot be done with just any book and there must be a lot of research to find just the right ones. We're thinking that's probably where Kait's expertise as a teacher comes into the picture.

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