Bilingual Education

I was thrilled when Ana posted a link to a story about the first national Spanish spelling bee on our Facebook fan page this past weekend. I eagerly read the BBC story and then went searching for more because, by that time, the bee had already taken place and I wanted to find out who had won. It was a seventh grade girl, Evelyn Juárez, from Santa Fe, N.M. I wasn’t surprised since that state has been holding spelling bees sinceRead More ...

Yesterday we talked about how important it is to keep your child’s mind active over the summer months. While there are many ways that you can keep kids busy right at home – one popular option is summer camp. Summer camps range from free and inexpensive to costly; some are sleep away camps and others are day or half-day camps. You can choose a local camp or one as far away as Costa Rica or Spain. To keep your bilingualRead More ...

They say that once you learn to ride a bicycle, you never forget – but is it true? Do we actually retain all skills and knowledge once learned? The truth is a skill usually must be consistently practiced or it can be lost, at least partially. This is especially evident in school children who go on summer break. At the start of each school year, precious weeks are wasted in the classroom as teachers try to get the children backRead More ...

I went to a British school back in Peru where I was taught the majority of my courses in English. The school has been around for a very long time (1938) and even my mother and her sisters went there when they were little. It has a great reputation and it’s undoubtedly responsible for my being bilingual since it was there where I learned English in a formal setting. When I attended the school in the 1980s, there used toRead More ...

Last month we launched My Bilingual School Library Contest, something we´ve been wanting to do for over a year. We took so long because we were constantly debating over the best way to conduct it so it would seem fair and unbiased to all. We chose to open it up to popular vote, but failed to see beforehand the many flaws in the way the system was set up. Since many things got out of hand, we decided to closeRead More ...

Yes, I´m selfishly using this space to get some advice from you. I´m actually a bit nervous to even pose this question here because it almost seems obvious that my girl needs to attend a language immersion pre-school, but it´s not so black and white. I´ve complained for years now that there are no viable language immersion pre-schools in the LA area.  For sure, none close to me.  So, when Camila turned 15 months I enrolled her in a familyRead More ...

UPDATE: Due to the great response we’ve received, we’ve decided to extend the deadline to enter this contest by one week. Please click on the graphic above for updated information. Thanks for your support! For more than a year now both Ana and I have been trying to come up with a way in which SpanglishBaby could give back to the bilingual community we so wholeheartedly support. We always knew we wanted to make sure we incorporated bilingual literacy inRead More ...

I’ve been doing some serious thinking about what will happen next year when Vanessa goes to kindergarten because there are basically no options when it comes to dual language education in Denver. Well, that’s not totally true, but the options that do exist are really not feasible for our family. Let’s see, there’s the private school she went to for the French immersion camp this summer. While I’d love for her to go there, unfortunately, it’s out of our leagueRead More ...