This is a sponsored post from One2One Network and ICAN. All opinions stated are our own.

As parents we only want the best for our babies. We know that for the first few months of their lives they are delicate little beings and we want to make sure no harm reaches them. We take time to arranged their cribs with soft blankets, bumpers or teddy bears to create a comfortable and loving environment. But what if the place where we thought they are safest turned out to be a hazard?

Last week we were invited to a Safe Sleep for Baby event that left us shocked and grateful to be there so we could pass on the knowledge that was made available to us. Did you know that approximately 70 infants die from suffocation while sleeping every year in Los Angeles county? This represents one infant every five days!

What exactly is causing infants to suffocate while sleeping? The answer is bed-sharing and unsafe sleeping environments such as sleeping on a couch or having pillows, soft or excessive bedding and stuffed toys in a baby’s crib or bassinet.

Below we’ve put together a list of data that was shared with us and that we want to pass on to all our readers. It’s also data that will hopefully answer some questions and highlight the seriousness of this issue:

• Bed-sharing and unsafe sleeping conditions accounted for 62% of all undetermined child deaths in L.A. county in 2011. 38% of those were due to bed-sharing and 24% were due to unsafe sleeping environments like those we mentioned above. 
• The majority of bed-sharing and unsafe sleep child deaths were infants between 0-6 months of age.
• For the first three to four months of life babies can only breathe through their nose.
• A baby’s nose doesn’t have cartilage yet, so it can easily flatten and block airflow causing them to suffocate.

Some of this data might seem only logical and common sense, but the facts don’t lie. The truth is that families are still waking up to a tragedies that could have been easily avoided. That’s why we urge you to share and pass on this knowledge. If it can reach the ears of one person who was unaware of the dangers of unsafe sleep we could all be preventing a tragedy.

For more information please visit the Safe Sleep for Baby website and like them on Facebook.

We all make mistakes, right? Especially along this journey of parenthood, we know that we constantly just don’t know and we try our best every single day. There really isn’t a single parenting manual that is a one-size-fits-all or that’s customized to your particular child and/or parenting journey.

But we do have each other. We have other parents that are open enough to share the good and the bad, the pretty and the ugly, and do it without giving or receiving judgement. We have our stories to tell so others can be inspired or realize that it’s not part of their own journey.

That’s precisely what we’ve done on SpanglishBaby for almost five years: share stories from many diverse voices on how we’re together creating a collective experience of the how-to and how-not-to raise bilingual and bicultural kids. We all know that we must expose our children to Spanish, or the target language, as young as possible. We know that we can’t force them to learn a language, but we can immerse them in ways that it will become part of their self. We know that we want to take this path for so many reasons, but most that have to do with the heart. Yet, the day-to-day is still full of surprises y curvas inesperadas.

I made one big mistake when raising my now 6-year-old girl as a bilingual child and I’ve been wanting to share this with you ever since I realized it. See, I’ve been obsessed with making sure we never, ever, ever spoke English to her and her exposure to English would be elsewhere and plentiful. I knew English would take over and I even called the stage a bilingual “rebellion,” implying my sort of battle at making sure her Spanish flourished beautifully. And that war is pretty much won.

So which battle did I lose? Where was I not strategic enough?

In her pronunciation in English.

In my obsession to make sure she spoke Spanish perfectly and since I had conditioned myself to never speak English to her, I would never correct her when she would mess up the pronunciation or tense of a word in English. I would just ignore it and repeat it en español. Turns out to not have been a very wise choice and I have no problem admitting it because I might not be the only one that made this decision.

Now that she’s in a dual immersion program and her Spanish skills are flourishing, I’m starting to notice more and more that while she’s completely bilingual (yet still in a really Spanglish/code-switching stage), she has so many more words in English that are used in the wrong tense or mispronounced because there hasn’t been a habit to correct her.

I’m not freaking out about this (yet) because I know she’s still developing her language skills overall and she’s really only in first grade, but I wonder if it would have made a difference if I would have not ignored her English completely.

Would love to know if this has happened to you, or if you also currently “ignore” your child’s mistakes in English or your country’s majority language? Please do share and let’s talk about this in the comments below.

The U.S. does not have an official language. English certainly plays a vital role and I would be lying if I thought it wasn’t a necessary part of an individuals’ linguistic repertoire in order to succeed in this country. That being said, children at an early age pick up on the high status English carries in their everyday interactions.

My nena, for example, already pegs anyone outside her home as “English-speaking.” I have very few friends and family that, in my nenas eyes, are Spanish speakers or bilingual (even though most of my friends are bilingual) because of the status English plays in her interactions with them. For these simple reasons alone I make it a point to attempt to increase the status of Spanish in our everyday lives.

One very strategic move I have made is to make sure all of her doctor visits are with Spanish-speaking, hence bilingual, practitioners. I am even willing to drive out of my way to make sure she see’s a bilingual doctor. In fact, I prefer for them to be female as well. I guess you can see my motives are two-fold. I want her to have role models she can identify with as she develops her identity as a bilingual Latina.

Recently we took her to her first dental appoint. It was important for me to find a Spanish speaking pediatric dentist because we had been talking about what dentists do entirely in Spanish and I wanted my daughter to make the connections we had talked about at home once she was seated in front of her actual dental practitioner. I called at least four different pediatric dental offices and solicited information from my friends on facebook to find a doctor closer our home.

Just like searching for the ideal bilingual school environment, I learned that there are other aspects of choosing the right doctor for my daughter. These aspects include considering whether or not the staff is kid-friendly and if the office had a ambience that made children feel comfortable. Well, all in all, we were lucky to find Texas Tooth Fairies Pediatric Dentistry. Dr. Singletary, a Venezuela native, and her staff were amazing. Not only did my nena get her teeth cleaned without a problem she actually LOVED the experience, as did I, because it was mostly in Spanish.

What are some strategic moves you have made to increase the status of Spanish in your everyday interactions?

{Photo courtesy of Suzanne}

I have nothing against technology when raising bilingual children. Apps, online games and movies in Spanish are a great supplement in this journey — but they’re just that, a supplement. It is a mistake to think that just sitting your child in front of the television set to watch a show in Spanish or to let them mouse around with a bilingual computer game will expose them to the kind of vocabulary needed to become proficient in the minority language.

More than one study has proven that the best way for children to develop their language and reading skills is through dialogue. This is particularly important for bilingual children. So motivate your child to interact verbally with you and you’ll be teaching him the basics of language: phonetics, vocabulary and grammar. These will eventually help him develop more complex skills such as reading and writing.

6 Ways to Improve Your Child’s Vocabulary:

1) Read, read and then read some more — Nothing is better for boosting your child’s vocabulary than reading. Read to them out loud. Read to them often. And it doesn’t have to be just books. You can read everything from labels to billboards to them!

2) Don’t change the way you normally speak — You don’t have to simplify your vocabulary when you talk to your children. They will get what you’re trying to say even when they don’t understand every single word. I’m pretty sure part of the reason why my daughter’s vocabulary is so extensive for her age is because I always speak to her the way I would if I were talking to, say, my husband.

3) Expand on the conversation — You can do this by responding to your child using longer sentences based on his simple phrases. When my 3-year-old son, Santiago, says something like: “Me encantan mis carritos.” I say something like: “Sí, tus carritos son muy divertidos porque van muy rápido. ¿Cuál es tu favorito?” I also do this a lot when I read him a book and he points to something in particular. I expand on what he’s saying by asking him to describe the object in more detail or relating it to something we did or saw recently. That always gets him going.

4) Understand that her mistakes are part of her progress — Grammar and pronunciation errors will happen as your child establishes her own knowledge of the language. Maybe she understands the rule about conjugating certain verbs, for example, but she’s not aware of the exceptions — and if you know anything about Spanish, then you know those abound. Just give her the correct response, but don’t make a big deal out of it. Vanessa used to do this constantly with the verb poner. She would say, “¿Por qué papito ponió su mochila ahí?” And I would respond, “Papito puso su mochila ahí para no olvidársela“. Eventually, she got it.

5) Turn everything into a topic of conversation — Try to provide your children with all kinds of experiences in as many different places as possible and as often as possible. I love taking walks around our neighborhood with my kids because just about anything going on out there becomes a topic of conversation and helps expand their vocabulary: children playing basketball, Easter decorations, the mailman delivering a package, etc.  In fact, it was thanks to one of our walks that Vanessa learned the phrase “darle la vuelta a la manzana” which translates as a walk around the block.

6) Learn to listen — Being a good listener is such an essential trait, yet not everybody possesses it. My father used to say: “Calla y escucha”. Roughly translated into: “Shut up and listen.” The truth is that you learn a lot more from listening than from talking — especially when it comes to helping your child enrich his vocabulary. It’s absolutely normal for little ones to go off on a tangent when verbalizing an idea or sharing a story with you. Just listen without interrupting and then you’ll be better equipped to ask the kind of questions that will lead to even more conversations.

What are some strategies you use to boost your child’s vocabulary?

{Photo by runintherain}

I’m not a huge breakfast eater — unless I go to the French bakery by my house, which is run by a couple from the south of France who moved to Denver five years ago. I don’t know how I got so lucky, but the bakery is on my way to Santiago’s preschool and so I stop in there regularly to devour freshly-baked croissants and the best baguettes I’ve ever had outside of France.

But one of the other reasons I love going there is that I get to practice my French with the owners. And whenever I go with my kids I get to show them — instead of telling them — how awesome it is that I can communicate with other people in their native language: one of the benefits of speaking more than one language.

Although it sometimes seems like there aren’t enough ways to immerse your children in the minority language outside of your home (especially the older they get), the truth is that sometimes we overlook some options that aren’t as obvious, but are awesome opportunities nonetheless. The best part about these is that they’re pretty simple things you can do on a regular basis which don’t require a lot of effort on your part.

1. Churches/Places of Worship

When I was looking into baptizing Vanessa, I knew I needed to find a church that offered services in Spanish so my  then 92-year-old grandmother, visiting from Perú, wouldn’t be lost during the ceremony. It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be, but I found one. Now, more than six years after moving to Denver, I’ve found many others. For me, it’s a great way to reconnect with my childhood, but it’s also the only way for me to participate in mass. I know this will sound kind of strange, but praying is one of those things I’d rather do in my native language.

Besides giving you and your kids the opportunity to attend services in the minority language, most churches organize activities and events outside of worship time. So this could be another great place for your children to be brought in contact with the minority language with others who share your beliefs. Due to the growing Latino population, you can probably find a place of worship that offers services in Spanish regardless of denomination.

2. Small, family-owned Latino restaurants

Although Denver is not devoid of Latino restaurants, it’s in its infancy stage when compared to Miami, where I spent the first 20 years of my life in the United States. Nevertheless, we have found a few great spots — some we frequent often because they’re near and some only on special occasions because they require a lot more driving. I’m talking about the kind of family-owned restaurants where Spanish is spoken freely and the menu is often in both languages, kind of like the French bakery I talked about at the top.

If you’re children are already reading, they can choose what they want and ask for it in Spanish! If not, you can introduce new vocabulary by talking about the items on the menu. This is also a great opportunity to talk about the importance of food for Latinos and the never-ending options we’re lucky to have.

3. Bodegas/Mercados/Hispanic Grocery Stores

Again, not a lot of these in my neck-of-the-woods, but enough for me to take my children and allow them to be surrounded by some of the smells and colors of our foods — an integral part of our culture. I’ve taken my daughter to one of this mercados and I’ve introduced her to some of the candy I used to enjoy as a child. Some is from my homeland, Peru, and some is from Mexico where I spent a few years as a child. Not only are these great places to expose our kids to Spanish, but also to our culture.

Keep in mind that these suggestions are universal, so they apply no matter which minority language you’re using. For example, just the other day, I drove by a Korean Methodist Church, which I later found out was started to cater to the Korean population in that area of Denver! The same can be said about ethnic food markets, not to mention restaurants and bakeries where other heritage languages, besides Spanish, is spoken.

{Photo by Big Grey Mare}

Handy Manny was the first to render me speechless. My twins were toddlers, and my mother-in-law had given them a Handy Manny tool box for Christmas. Awesome gift, hours of play time ensured. We ripped it open, started in with all of Manny’s tools, his martillo, his…his…. A whole set of toys were splayed before me and I didn’t know the Spanish word for any of them. El serrucho y el destornillador - somehow those words never made it into the Spanish classes I’d taken since I started learning the language in seventh grade.

Vocab lists for the countless types of trucks and tractors in this world? They didn’t exist either. I realized that over the years I’d gathered an extensive knowledge of Spanish, yet I was missing the vocabulary of childhood. As we began to read more books, explore more imaginary worlds, I needed a virtual dictionary or at least my husband, a native Spanish speaker, nearby to pinch hit. With time, though, my vocabulary blossomed, and each new word gave me that sense of discovery kids have when they learn something new. I played with each word as it rolled off my tongue, and tried to figure out how to weave my new expressions into more conversations and stories. Soon we were flying a cohete to the moon,

 fighting Capitan Garfio with the help of Campanita,

and learning about the licks and love of a newborn cachorrito. As my littlest learned to neigh and growl, screech, squawk and hiss, so did I.

When we first decided to raise our kids bilingual, I lamented that I’d never get to use the witty English-language sayings parents use to keep their kids in line – stored up over more than three decades of listening to my and other moms. I still have a hard time with the fact that some of my favorite children’s books aren’t translated into Spanish.

I try not to sweat it though. Truth is, I wouldn’t trade my new words for the world.

{first photo by Loren Javier , photo of puppy by  justmakeit }

When Aidan (my now 4.5 year old) was 3 years old, he decided that he was going to refuse to do anything “Chinese”. He used to lower his head and shove his hands deep into his pockets when asked to speak Chinese. He one day declared that he didn’t want to speak Chinese anymore. My son decided Chinese wasn’t cool, or hip, or relevant to anything he was interested in. Everything fun was in English, his Chinese friends all spoke English with him, and I understood English too.

Over the years, I had searched for Chinese language resources for kids under 6, but couldn’t find anything that engaged long enough to benefit. I kept thinking there was a lost opportunity here, since the best time to learn/maintain languages is before the kids are 6. Since I’m conversationally fluent in Mandarin, I thought speaking to him at home would be enough, so I didn’t spend too much time worrying about the lack of language tools. But once I realized outside influences were competing for his attention, I knew I needed additional tools to re-spark Aidan’s interest in his mother-tongue. Forcing Chinese down his throat wasn’t an option for me, because I’ve seen how that type of influence leads to rebellion later on… parents speak to their children in the mother-tongue and the kids respond in English.

I’ve been in the videogame industry for over a decade, and after several moms approached me about the idea of leveraging the ever-so-popular tablet to become a language-learning tool, I jumped on board. This tablet-based tool is called Peach Ice Cream Adventures (PICA), and it will be a language-immersion adventure game specifically designed for 3-6 year olds, with Spanish, Chinese and French being the first three languages we are developing. What started off as a joint effort between three moms wanting a fun way to keep a mother tongue in the family has blossomed into a realization that there is a need for this tool extended beyond our own children and our own immediate needs: A Boston City Councillor of an inner city district wants PICA for his preschools/K1/K2.

If we raise enough money to make PICA, an awesome company called Isabella Products will be donating tablets pre-loaded with PICA to the schools so we can run a pilot next summer!!! And if that works, I have plans to roll out in other inner city schools as well. Kids from inner cities are usually have limited or have no access to the latest tools, but we want them to be part of the first.

We are using a fundraising platform called Kickstarter, which is a funding platform for creative projects. For a lack of better terminology, it is a pre-ordering platform that lets interested prospective customers pre-purchase (via pledges) to support the development and launch of the product. One catch is that Kickstarter is an “all-or-nothing” deal…you need to raise a minimum of the dollar amount or PICA can’t be made. We have 12 days to get enough pledges to get PICA into the hands of our kids and those in inner cities. Pre-order some cool Spanish (or Chinese or French) tools today to help us reach our goal. Folks pledging/pre-ordering as a gift for a special child in their life can let me know, and I’ll email a beautiful holiday card that states a purchase was made on the child’s behalf.

Click to pledge and pre-order by Dec. 17

Vicky spent the past 12 years in the videogame industry, and became passionate about making STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) education more appealing and accessible to youth. Inspired by her older son (now 4.5), Vicky launched an early education enrichment program that uses STEM principles as a vehicle for Chinese language immersion. The success of the enrichment program has led her to start digitizing her curriculum by creating tablet-based language-learning games, specifically aimed at 3-6 year olds.

Parents and bilingual teachers have a problem. At the beginning of a relationship, kids establish the language they want to use to communicate with an adult. Once established, it is not easy to convince the children to speak another language with them. Given this situation, what can parents and teachers who want to use two languages with the children do? One solution is to introduce the children to a puppet that only speaks the target language. 

Many adults remember a puppet that they got to “know” in elementary school, and they remember the lessons that puppet taught them. In fact there are many academic studies that show the advantages of teaching with puppets. According to Allison Lepley of Fairfax County Public Schools (2001), children who learn through puppets have better oral comprehension, are able to more easily internalize language patterns and develop confidence and skills that help them work well in cooperative learning groups. All of these skills help to facilitate language learning.

The introduction of a “friend” creates a fun environment and helps to establish a new routine more easily. Children tend to be quite comfortable talk to puppets, and since the new puppet only speaks the target language, the adult doesn’t have to face the battle of convincing the kids to change the established relationship language. Simply put, everyone needs to speak the puppet’s native language so the new friend can understand everything.

Using a puppet is something that both teachers and parents can implement. At home a puppet can visit the children during playtime and play with the toys, games or puzzles. The children can also sing, dance or read with the puppet that can even teach them new vocabulary! As we always stress, developing literacy skills in the second language is important and the puppet can always “ask” the parents to read books in the puppet’s native language. A fun idea is to make or buy a puppet that is a character from one of the children’s favorite books. At school, the puppet can co-teach, directing lessons and activities in the native language.

Since playing with puppets and speaking with different voices in order to develop the puppet’s personality isn’t something natural for many adults, the blog Fun for Spanish Teachers has some great tips to facilitate the process:

• The puppet should look at the children even when it is talking to the adult.
• When two puppets are conversing, they should look at the children, not each other.
• When the puppet is talking, the adult should look at it.
• Don’t forget to move the mouth according to the syllables of the words, and don’t open its mouth too far.

With a little practice in front of a mirror and by implementing music, poems, games and reading, everyone can be successful teaching language with puppets. And don’t forget that adults aren’t the only ones who should use the puppets. One never knows how much a child with talk given the chance to converse with a puppet or make two puppets talk to each other!

Have fun!

*Lepley, A. (2001). How Puppetry Helps the Oral Language Development of Language Minority Kindergartners. Fairfax County Public Schools.

Amy Hornby Uribe s a translator and Spanish language grammar and linguistics advisor for Heritage Language. She has her PhD in foreign language education from the University of Texas-Austin. During her career she has taught at the middle school, high school and university levels. Now, she is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Winona State University. Amy has two small children who she is raising in a bilingual environment.

Do you love trabalenguas? I do, but it never really occurred to me that tongue twisters are a great tool to reinforce my kids’ Spanish. I mean, I’ve recited a couple of my favorite here and there, but I hadn’t taken the time to formally introduce Vanessa to them til this weekend.

About four weeks ago, my family and I went to San Diego for my stepson’s graduation from the Marines. Although we were only there for a long weekend, we decided to take a trip south of the border into Tijuana. Besides having a great time with really good friends, we brought back home a lot of goodies, including tons of Mexican candy and, most importantly, several children’s books and other reading materials in Spanish — but we hadn’t had a chance to go through it all just yet.

Since we wanted to escape the frigid temperatures brought about by our first snow storm, we spent a lot of time indoors this weekend. At some point, Vanessa brought me of Muy Interesante Junior, one of the kid’s magazine we bought in Tijuana and together we started going through it. Nothing caught her attention much until we got to a page titled “El destrabalenguario” by journalist Eduardo Limón and as we started reading about tongue twisters and the story behind the three examples included in the article.

This was a great opportunity for me to talk to Vanessa about trabalenguas and to teach her some of my favorite ones. And she loved them all! Coincidentally, one of the children’s books we also got in that trip to Mexico was one titled Trabalenguas para todos by María Tellez (the one Vanessa’s holding in the photo you see here), but we hadn’t even opened it (in Latin America, books are sold wrapped in cellophane). Since Vanessa showed so much interest, I figured it’d be a great time to introduce her to even more trabalenguas and I was so happy to see she was totally hooked!

She walked around with the book most of Sunday afternoon, sharing some of the trabalenguas she discovered with whomever would listen and trying to recite the ones she had memorized as fast as possible. Since we had so much fun with them, I thought I’d share her favorite ones (so far) with you so maybe you can teach them to your bilingual kids and burst out laughing too!

From Muy Interesante Junior:

Si yo como como como y tú comes como comes

¿Cómo comes como como? Si yo como como como.

From Trabalenguas para todos:

Si Pancha plancha con cuatro planchas,

¿con cuántas planchas plancha Pancha?

===========================================

Cuando cuentes cuentos

cuenta cuántos cuentos cuentas

porque cuando cuentas cuentos

nunca cuentas cuántos cuentos cuentas.

===========================================

Ñoño Yáñez come ñame

en las mañanas con el niño.

Besides being super fun and challenging for anyone regardless of their fluency in Spanish, trabalenguas are a great way to practice pronunciation. Next time, I’ll share some of the ones I’ll be adding to the repertoire of exercises I’ve been using to help Vanessa in one of her problem areas: rolling her R’s.

Do you have a favorite trabalenguas you’d like to share with us?

One of the things that scared me the most about raising my son to speak three languages was that he would speak them all incorrectly. When I heard him say “parqueadero” for parking instead of estacionamiento I didn’t know what to say, I almost cried!

Now that he is 9 years old, he is making fewer and fewer mistakes and I am not worried about his misuse of words anymore. Kids just mix them as they learn and it is okay!

What do you do when your kids say something in Spanglish that is just simply horrible to your ears? How do you react? We invite you to share your kids’ “not so cute” Spanglish on Words on Wednesday discussion at SpanglishBaby Playground.

Melissa Cunningham shared her son’s “annoying Spanglish” words: “Voy a bringuer las cosas conmigo… Mom, she gasts all of our time/money/paint.”

What do you think? Join the conversation!