One of our favorite animated characters, the lovable Pocoyó, is celebrating the Olympics with a suite of games, printables, videos and all-around-fun with the Pocoyó Games 2012. When you visit the Pocoyó Games site – available in Spanish, English, Portuguese and Italian — your child can have fun doing any and all of this: Pocoyize! Create your own avatar and have it flaunt a tshirt with the flag of the country you’re rooting for. Once you create your avatar, youRead More ...
There are rites of passage in many cultures that are sure to raise eyebrows, and even judgmental comments, from others. Many are justified for being inhumane and even torturous, but I refuse to believe that piercing my daughter’s ears when she was an infant falls within that spectrum. If I sound defensive right off the bat, I might be just a tiny bit. This week I wrote an article over at my Babble Voices blog – Besos – titled “HowRead More ...
Do you ever wonder how your identity would be altered had you been born and raised in a different part of the country? The American Latino experience is vast indeed, but poignantly so when comparing the experiences of Latinos living on the polar coasts of our great nation. As a Cuban growing up in the beach suburbs of Los Angeles, many years before communities such as ours at SpanglishBaby existed, there was truly only one reality for the Latino experience:Read More ...
My six week trip home to Chile is coming to an end. This is by far the longest I have spent here in many, many years. In my last post I mentioned how happy I was to have my son hearing Spanish everywhere, improving his vocabulary and really practicing the language. But I also realized, that I a native speaker have also benefited from a complete language immersion. Spanish 100% of the time. No English whatsoever. No Spanglish, no fillingRead More ...
Why English Is No Longer Enough from The Huffington Post — Not that we need to be convinced, but it’s always nice to hear others saying it. Interesting read! Bilingual Fluency & Disparities in Fluency from Latinaish.com — Our friend Tracy López writes about the differences in her children’s levels of fluency in Spanish. I’ve always found this topic super interesting because in my own household growing up my siblings and I all had different levels of fluency in SpanishRead More ...
Two or three weeks ago, my boys and their father went on a much-needed road trip to visit family in Kansas City. When they came back, I overheard Primo and Secondo talking about how they’d eaten rice and beans while they were away. “Rice and beans?” I asked my husband. “Where did they eat rice and beans?” “At my brother’s,” he answered matter-of-factly. My husband’s Midwestern family traveled to Costa Rica for our wedding nearly ten years ago. They’d neverRead More ...
A huge ¡Gracias! to Lovereading for creating this amazing infographic for us and for you to share, print, pin, email and love! Of course, we can’t agree more that “Bilingual is Better” for all! ...
When my eldest daughter and son began to read in kindergarten a couple of years ago — in English— I was ecstatic. I love books, and had been reading to them in both Spanish and English since they were little. And then, it hit me. When would they begin to read in Spanish? Being able to read in Spanish is not just an advantage during travel in Latin America or Spain. It’s so much more! Reading (and writing) in SpanishRead More ...
Ana
Roxana
We are two Latina moms – best friends since college – who are extremely passionate about ensuring our children not only speak both our languages, English and Español, but that they also grow up proud of both their cultures, Latino and American. Over three years ago we realized there's was a lack of information available for parents raising bilingual + bicultural children, so using our background in media, we launched SpanglishBaby.
