bilingual education

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 ...

Call me crazy but I decided to complicate my attempt to expose my baby to multiple languages by adding another element: baby sign. Maybe it’s not too surprising given my level of interest in teaching Sabrina three languages. I wanted to keep teaching her sign language as simple as possible because it seems that our lives are already a bit chaotic. I contemplated between using American Sign Language (ASL) versus Baby Sign because ASL is actually recognized as a languageRead More ...

UPDATE: Due to the great response we’ve received, we’ve decided to extend the deadline to enter this contest by one week. Please click on the graphic above for updated information. Thanks for your support! For more than a year now both Ana and I have been trying to come up with a way in which SpanglishBaby could give back to the bilingual community we so wholeheartedly support. We always knew we wanted to make sure we incorporated bilingual literacy inRead More ...

It’s spring, which means it’s IEP season. My third one. Simply put, that means it’s time to get together with our special education team and discuss my children’s present level of performance in school, come up with annual goals for next year, and decide what special education services they will need. At the end of the process we will have an Individualized Education Program for each of them, a document that we will revisit periodically to check their progress. ThisRead More ...

Last week we posted the following question on our Facebook fan page: “What has been your biggest obstacle in raising a bilingual child?” Within minutes, we had tons of answers explaining all kinds of different obstacles. But soon it was clear which were the most prevalent (in no particular order): #1 You’re the only one who speaks Spanish at home (or the OPOL method is hard to do) I’ve always kind of silently envied those who use the OPOL methodRead More ...