Celebrate DIA With This List of Handpicked Books in Spanish!

I LOVE April 30th! Happy Día del niño/Día del libro! What can be better than celebrating kids and books, right? Here at SpanglishBaby we think it’s such a huge celebration that we’ve been running our first annual Celebrating Bilingual Readers Contest since last week. The grand prize? More than $300 worth of bilingual/Spanish children’s books so you can start your own home library AND a Kindle Fire for all those e-books now available in Spanish through Amazon’s Tienda Kindle!

The best part? You still have until May 8 to enter this contest and it’s SUPER easy! All you have to do is upload a picture of the cover of your child’s favorite Spanish or bilingual book to the contest app we’ve installed on our Facebook page. (IMPORTANT: Please make sure you upload your picture there and not just on our wall since that’s against Facebook’s guidelines and your entry will be void). We’re loving all the book covers that have already been uploaded! ¡Gracias!

Now that all the info about our great contest is out of the way, let me tell you what I’m doing today: sharing with you a list of books in Spanish recommended by the librarian at the dual language school I used to go to when I was a child back in Peru. If you read my post about the stuff my mom brought back from her recent trip to our home country, you know I’ve been raving about this awesome list of books that I’d never heard of before. Although some of the books are only available in Latin America (which means you’ll have to ask somebody there to get them for you), luckily I found some of them on Amazon and I’ve linked them here.

By the way, this is a list for children who already know how to read (or are in the process of learning), so ideally for those in grades 1-3. Although Vanessa is only in kindergarten, she’s learning to read so well and so fast that she’s been able to read some of the books below by herself. The others I’m reading to her until she’s ready.

LIST OF BOOKS IN SPANISH FOR EARLY READERS:

• Colección Barco de Vapor (serie blanca)
• Colección pequeños grandes genios — Books about our world’s greatest inventors and geniuses, including Leonardo da Vinci, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison and Galileo Galilei
• Colección Torre de Papel (primeros lectores)
• Todo por el chocolate (Julie de Trazegnies) — I haven’t been able to find any of Julie’s books here, but we’ve had them ever since I first found them on a trip to Peru several years ago. They are some of Vanessa’s favorite books! (BTW, Julie and I went to the same dual language school in Peru!)
• Los helados enredos de Ana (Julie de Trazegnies)
• Baltazar el grande ( Julie de Trazegnies)
• Goig ( Alfredo Bryce Echenique)
• El ángel que perdió un ala (Diana Cornejo)
• La suerte de Ozu (Claudia Rueda)
• Felicia y Odicia (Maria Eugenia Blanco Palacios)
• Ramiro (Beatriz Ferro)
• Fonchito y La Luna (Mario Vargas Llosa) — Another favorite at home, which I bought as soon as it came out while on a trip to Peru. I love Vargas Llosa and this, his first children’s book, is not different. It’s a beautiful story about the things we’re willing to do for love.

I hope you get as excited about this list as I was when I first got it. A special THANKS to my childhood friend Carla Raffo, whom I also went to school with back in Peru, for asking the librarian at our alma mater, San Silvestre School, (where she is now a teacher) for these recommendations. ¡Mil gracias!

What do you think about this list? Have you heard about some of the books on it before? Do you have others you’d like to share?