Must Reads

“Mamá, yo solo hablo inglés,” were the words I had been dreading for four years and that inevitably came out of my girl’s mouth a few days ago. Did you catch the irony in it? She said “Mom, I only speak English” but she said it in Spanish! I calmly responded to her, en español, “Ah, ¿si? Y, ¿Porqué?”(“Oh, yeah? Why?”) She responde, en espanol, “Porque cuando estoy sola solo hablo en inglés.” (“Because when I’m alone I only speakRead More ...

We always get asked if there’s a window of opportunity when it’s  the ideal age to raise bilingual kids.  There are actually several windows, or critical periods, for language learning when our brain is more adaptive to absorbing the new language(s), the broadest being from 0 to seven years of age, even before we learn to talk. Bilingual Baby Project–a study presented by researchers of the University of Washington and the University of Texas at San Antonio–concluded that the earlier weRead More ...

I’m not sure at what moment it hit me, but this summer I was determined to take my three kids, ages 9, 6, and 5 abroad for a cultural immersion experience. I wasn’t sure where we were going yet, I only knew that I wanted to be immersed in either the French or Spanish language and culture. Why did I want to do this? Well, 34 years ago I was born in Mexico City, Mexico, to a Mexican mother andRead More ...

Ana and I have a big announcement to make today: SpanglishBaby will soon be a book! We’re writing un libro! A couple of months ago, we were approached by Bilingual Readers – a bilingual publishing house based in Spain which we highly respect and whose bilingual children’s books we’ve reviewed in the past – to see if we’d be interested in taking SpanglishBaby to yet another level by publishing a book about raising bilingual and bicultural children in the UnitedRead More ...

Editor’s note: This is Part 6 in a continuing series by Amy Conroy. To read the other parts, go here. Although this is the last one from San Miguel de Allende, Amy has promised one more post a few weeks after they’re back home in Los Angeles to share their impressions on their immersion adventure. We hope you’ve enjoyed living vicariously through Amy and her kids as much as we have! This will be short and sweet as I amRead More ...

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 ...

Once we were married, my husband and I had put the worst behind us. Our families ended up showing for the wedding, despite our being interracial and interfaith, and that was a triumph on its own. Not long afterward, we were due for our daughter, Lilyana. We waited anxiously to find out what she would act and look like and how her beautiful little voice would sound. But, the news of our coming hijita brought new challenges in dealing withRead More ...

It was a lovely sight. A dozen children, most of them preschoolers, all speaking Spanish — and some English – in the backyard of my house. I hadn’t hosted a meetup for my bilingual playgroup in a long, long time. And I’m so happy I finally did. We’re about to celebrate our three year anniversary as a group and I can honestly say that the friendships both my children and I have made because of it are priceless. I wasRead More ...