Daily Blog

This week, my daily news surfing brought me to this article from NPR about the unclear future of the Spanish language in the U.S. The author, Luis Clemens, challenges the idea that the growing number of Latinos in America automatically means there will be more Spanish speakers going forward. Those of us in the middle of child rearing in more than one language are familiar with how much work and conscious planning it takes to achieve the end of producingRead More ...

  Happy Día de los Niños/Día de los Libros! Back in the summer of 2008, when Ana and I started thinking about the idea of launching this blog, we were prompted by what we took as a lack of resources for parents raising bilingual kids. One of our biggest problems was finding quality bilingual or Spanish children’s books without having to resort to traveling to Latin America to get our hands on them. While we did find some options, backRead More ...

Editor’s note: SpanglishBaby is excited to participate in Latinas 4 Latino Literature Blog Hop in celebration of el Día de los Niños/El Día de los Libros with a short interview with Duncan Tonatiuh, a Mexican author and illustrator (check out his cool illustration above). His latest children’s book “Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote: A Migrant’s Tale” will be released May 7. SpanglishBaby: How would you describe your book “Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote”? It’s a picture book. It’s 32 pages long andRead More ...

One of the greatest perks of being a blogger is all of the connections and new people you meet that you wouldn’t have otherwise. Since starting here at SpanglishBaby my network of other like-minded bilingual parents has grown and we have all been able to connect on different levels yet at the core is desire to raise our children speaking a second language. A few months ago I received an email from a fellow Latina mamá who had been readingRead More ...

In my father’s grand tradition of celebrating Thanksgiving in April — or whenever else he felt like it — he and I didn’t celebrate my birthday in May. We did celebrate it with cake or maybe a family gathering. But I always got my big gift, the one I looked forward to all year, in July. Back in the eighties there was only one place to find books in English in Costa Rica — where I grew up. It wasRead More ...

The verdict is in! Our daughter was accepted into the private dual language school I wrote about last month. The question now remains whether or not she will attend. We decided to start the lengthy application process because we wanted to have options. In fact, she remains on several rotating waiting lists at several daycare centers around town because one never knows. Before making our decision, there is a still a reflective process my husband and I need to goRead More ...

Editor’s note: This post was originally published on Dec. 7, 2009. On occasion, we re-publish older posts that we deem are still relevant to ensure our new readers are exposed to all of our content.  Although sometimes I long for a few minutes of silence, the reality is that I love the fact that my three-year-old daughter, Vanessa, talks non-stop. Her vocabulary in Spanish is extensive and I know it has to do with the fact that I’ve talked toRead More ...

We dedicated all of last week to explore the topic of immersion travel and its amazing benefits in terms of your children’s bilingualism and biculturalism. But if traveling with your family for an extended period of time to a Spanish-speaking country is not an option for you right now, you can always send your kids to a language summer camp without having to travel too far. Language summer camps are run the same way a regular summer camp is: aRead More ...