Must Reads

I went to a British school back in Peru where I was taught the majority of my courses in English. The school has been around for a very long time (1938) and even my mother and her sisters went there when they were little. It has a great reputation and it’s undoubtedly responsible for my being bilingual since it was there where I learned English in a formal setting. When I attended the school in the 1980s, there used toRead More ...

I struggled a lot in writing this post. Not because it was difficult really, but because this is my husband’s story and it’s one that I don’t take lightly. I really wanted to do justice to the challenges that he’s faced, and ones that we are now facing as a family. I know that we all have different stories to tell and I believe that we all need to be heard. With that in mind, I want to share partRead More ...

“Back to basics” is at the core of everything I believe about teaching my children multiple languages; love is the essence. Here’s a list of seven basic virtues to help us get back to the basics in creating homemade multilingualism – with love! 1. Love My passion for languages begins with my love for my family whether in the USA, France, Mexico or Peru. I keep in touch with them through phone calls, letters, the Internet and visits. My childrenRead More ...

The story of my mom is not that of a single mom who sacrificed everything to make sure I had a better life. Or of an immigrant mom who came to this country not knowing a word of English and raised three successful professionals by working two jobs. Neither is it the story of a mom who slaved in the kitchen to ensure we had the most comforting home-cooked meals to cure all our ailments. No, the story of myRead More ...

There are so many wonderful reasons why I love being a mom to a bilingual and bicultural child. And beyond the long-term benefits that it will have for my son as he navigates through life, I keep coming back to a nostalgic feeling of keeping a connection between my son and my home country of Venezuela. I was born in Caracas and we moved to the Unites States in 1980 when I was just 6-years-old. According to my mother, IRead More ...

As someone who was raised by a single mother, Mother’s Day has an extra special significance to me.  Not only because we celebrated it twice in my home. Dominican’s Mother’s Day is on the last Sunday of the month. To me Mother’s Day signifies something bigger — the daily struggles, endurance, determination and influence of a woman who came to this country for a better life. My mother promised to make certain my brother and I had a better life than the one she had growingRead More ...

As a first generation Latina it is of the utmost importance for me that my children learn to speak and write proper Spanish. Much more than that, I find myself lecturing my closest friends and family — also first generation — when I hear they don’t speak Spanish to their children. The answer I often get from these parents is that it is effortless to talk to them in English because they are learning the language in school and theyRead More ...

Before our baby was born, my husband and I had a silent agreement, “We’d raise a multilingual child.”  I won’t deny, I was worried, would this delay her speech? I often wondered if she’d be confused by hearing all three languages spoken at once. Friends said babies were like sponges, they absorb everything, so my worrying went away, well, decreased.  And so our daughter was born and we began speaking all three languages.  My husband’s native language is Croatian, mine isRead More ...