Must Reads

I thought I knew *a lot* about dual immersion schools because I’ve been researching them for both the blog and our book for almost four years now, but now that my daughter has been in one for almost four months I have a whole new understanding of them. I know the topic of bilingual education as a whole is so confusing for parents because there are so many different programs (ELL, ESL, full immersion, partial immersion, etc) and because, dependingRead More ...

My daughter has been attending her dual immersion school in Spanish for almost three months now and I can honestly say she’s made a lot of progress. I think the most noticeable improvement has been in her increased self-esteem and the value she’s now given to speaking Spanish.  She tries much harder to complete sentences in Spanish and doesn’t get frustrated when I nudge her to speak it. My husband keeps insisting that she’s speaking way too much English andRead More ...

Two weeks ago I flew out to my birth city of Houston, TX to be part of the Latinos in Social Media (LATISM) 2012 National Conference. I was excited to be there for a book signing for Bilingual is Better and to accept an award for SpanglishBaby as Best Parenting Blog and for Latina Bloggers Connect (my other endeavor) as Best Latino(a)Social Network Leader. That sounds like enough action for one conference, but I couldn’t refuse an invitation from JohnsonRead More ...

Last week during our media tour in Miami for our book Bilingual is Better, Roxana and I had to answer lots of questions regarding raising bilingual kids. One of the top questions we got was what are the best tips to successfully raise a bilingual child. So, I decided to share those tips over at my Babble Voices blog this week. Here’s a list of the 10 tips and you can click over to Babble for more detailed information on each.Read More ...

I was one of those very lucky kids who attended a dual language immersion school. Although I moved around a lot as a child — living in 5 countries in 3 continents by the time I was 14 — I spent five solid years at my mother’s alma mater back in Peru and I was instructed mostly in English from 4th to 8th grade. As far as I remember, I only had a handful of courses, including Historia and GeografíaRead More ...

The day we’d been awaiting for finally came: first day of school at Franklin Language Academy’s dual immersion Spanish class. Camila, my husband and I had been getting all the essentials like the backpack, lunchbox, name tags and such ready, but we had also been gently reminding the girl that this school would be different than her Montessori preschool because it was all in Spanish. I even took her with me on a trip to Cancun last week where sheRead More ...

Did that headline shock you? It shocked me to write it and admit it because I’ve been claiming for years now that my 5-year old is completely bilingual. I mean, we’re doing everything right, or at least we were for a while. First let me tell you why and how I realized she’s not as bilingual as I thought and then I’ll explain where I think we messed up. Fisher-Price invited Roxana and I to be one of their PlayRead More ...

The main thing we were both trying to create when we launched SpanglishBaby, exactly three and a half years ago, was an online community for parents raising bilingual children just like us. Fortunately — and thanks to all of you! — we’ve been able to create a growing community of parents on the same journey of love, passion and determination to raise children in more than one language and aware of their cultural heritage(s). Now the time has come for usRead More ...