The Fun with Lulu children’s stories idea began as a way to use specially designed books to help encourage reading skills in young children by reading to dogs. Lulu was being trained to be a therapy dog with intentions that she would participate in the Pawsitive Reading program through the Share-A-Pet organization located in South Florida. In this program, therapy dogs enter classrooms to work with children who face reading challenges and the programs helps them to overcome their fears by reading to dogs who give unconditional and positive attention to the children, helping them to relax and finally learn to enjoy reading.

However, before she could complete her training we relocated to a new city across the state where there was not a similar program available. Sometime after this we relocated again to Italy where our story changed drastically.

In the years that followed, I began teaching English to Italians, many of them were younger children during the first couple of years. During English summer camp programs I was able to bring Lulu to camp and she became my teaching assistant. She finally performed other therapy work unintentionally by helping some of the children who had a fear of dogs to overcome their fear during the summer camp program where they were learning and practicing English language.

These experiences and others during our time together have inspired stories that I would love to publish now as well-designed bilingual books to help not only Italian students learn English, but also any foreign language learner to learn a second language. Time and funding are necessary for me to return to this project.