Study Suggests that Learning a Language Can Make Your Brain Grow from The New York Daily News — More proof that learning a new language is a great way to keep the brain healthy! 5 Cool Places to Learn a Foreign Language Abroad by CNN — Too bad I already speak Spanish because all of this sound absolutely fascinating. Maybe I should check out the option that will allow me to learn Italian? 8 Things We Love About Being in a Spanish Immersion School from MamiRead More ...
Week in Links for #BilingualKids — Oct. 12
10 Tips to Successfully Raise a Bilingual Child
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 ...
How To Arrange a Spanish Immersion Experience Abroad
Our family was fortunate to have had the opportunity to once again immerse our children in Spanish by traveling abroad. You may remember that last year we spent the summer in Peru. This summer was spent in Costa Rica. There really is nothing like travel to enhance your child’s language skills and to provide them with global and cultural understanding. Such trips require planning and effort, but the work is well worth it. Since I do not have family livingRead More ...
Let’s Encourage all Kids to Learn Another Language
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 ...
What the Power of Family Can Do for Bilingualism
“Secondo will maintain a topic of conversation with a peer for 3 conversational turns in 4/5 observed opportunities over a two-month period.” The IEPs are tucked away in a drawer at home. We are far away at my mother’s in Costa Rica, so I’m not sure that’s how the text reads exactly, but that’s the general idea. The many IEP goals are formal, measurable, and easy to forget unless I dig the papers out and read them once in aRead More ...
My Daughter Is Not As Bilingual As I Thought
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 ...
Ask An Expert: Is It Too Late For My 11 Year-Old Son To Learn Spanish?
Hi, my son is 11 and I didn’t teach him Spanish. Though my other two kids speak Spanish, for selfish reasons I failed to teach my son the language the we speak at home. My other kids will only speak in English though they understand and speak Spanish. My youngest who is 11 is not being exposed to the language. I am very depressed about this because I harmed my own child by not teaching him our language. I don’tRead More ...