This week’s Ask an Expert question was sent in by Leticia and I am so happy she did because I just recently started wondering the same thing. Vanessa is totally into the alphabet and wanting to know “¿qué dice aquí?” all the time.
“I would like to teach my kids to read in Spanish. Any suggestions on materials to use? Thanks.”
Hi Leticia! I love your name! Leticia is one of my favorite cities in Colombia – it’s in the Amazon region and it’s a very beautiful place!
With regard to your question, there are tons of great sites online that can help kids read in Spanish. Here is a collection of some of my favorites. You can also check out my Delicious bookmarks (http://www.delicious.com/miscositas) and my website for updated links that seem to pop up every day! ¡Buena suerte!
America Reads Spanish: this is a great place to start looking for reading materials. On this site you can download a book called: Essential Guide to Spanish Reading for Children and Young Adults, which is an annotated bibliographic list of great reading in Spanish sorted by age level and recommended by librarians and educators from around the country! http://www.americareadsspanish.org/
World Digital Library: this site makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world; materials are available in Spanish and several other languages. http://www.wdl.org/en/#
International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL): A digital library of outstanding children’s books from all over the world; read full texts with accompanying images; search archive by country to find books in Spanish – and many other languages. http://en.childrenslibrary.org/
StoryPlace: A digital online library for kids with stories, games and activities; kids can read along with the story as the audio portion plays. http://www.storyplace.org/sp/
BookBox: A neat site with interesting stories in different languages, with subtitles or without them; you can access a sample of the story for free, but the full story is $2.99 to download and keep; free games and other materials as well; materials available in English, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Hindi and 21 other languages. http://www.bookbox.com/
MisCositas: My site! I have over 20 “virtual picturebooks” that students can read, with challenging vocabulary words linked to a pop-up picture dictionary; after reading the “book,” kids can view the accompanying video on our YouTube channel. http://www.miscositas.com
Lori Langer de Ramirez – Bilingual educator who began her career as a teacher of Spanish, French and ESL. She holds a Master’s Degree in Applied Linguistics and a Doctorate in Curriculum and Teaching from Teachers College, Columbia University. She is currently the Chairperson of the ESL and World Language Department for Herricks Public Schools, New York. Lori is the author of Take Action: Lesson Plans for the Multicultural Classroom and Voices of Diversity: Stories, Activities and Resources for the Multicultural Classroom, as well as several Spanish-language books and texts (Cuéntame – Folklore y Fábulas and Mi abuela ya no está). Her interactive website (miscositas.com) offers teachers over 40 virtual picture books and other curricular materials for teaching Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, Italian, Spanish and Thai. Her areas of research and curriculum development are multicultural and diversity education, folktales in the language classroom and technology in language teaching. You can read her answers here.
Thank you so much for these resouces! I’m excited to use them
Your Mis Cositas site is amazing! Is there any way to save the youtube videos to a flash drive. I want to use the stories in my classroom, but youtube is blocked. I’ll be using this info. with my classroom and my own bilingual kids.
Thank you so much! I am so excited about your site and will be sharing it with other teachers that I work with. I just love it!
Thank you so much for all the wonderful links. I’ll be bookmarking all of them and visiting them often. I can’t wait to add them to my at-home-preschool curriculum.
I’ve also shared this info with several other teachers that I worked with and mamis that are raising their little ones bilingual.
.-= Lisa Renata´s last blog ..snow :: nieve =-.
Could you give more direction to finding the Essential Guide to Spanish Reading for Children and Young Adults on America Reads Spanish website. I searched for it and to no avail. Mil gracias
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I am so excited to find your website and just want to Thanks to you