bilingual kids

A few months ago I was texting back and forth with my good friend Melanie of ModernMami and she came up with the excellent idea of getting our girls to become pen pals. Although they’ve only met each other once when we visited Disney last year, we figured it’d be a good way for them to keep in touch and practice their Spanish at the same time. Plus, I have such fond memories of my own pen pals growing up (IRead More ...

Enjoying the first few days of summer? I sure hope so! We’ve had record-breaking temperatures in Denver and so we’re spending a lot of time by the pool. Here’s some of the reading on bilingualism I’ve been doing while lounging  . Enjoy! Experts: Undocumented students could fill bilingual teacher shortage from KVUE-Dallas — Fifteen percent of bilingual and ESL jobs go unfilled in North Texas schools. Many times administrator have to turn to Mexico to recruit teachers. But Obama’s newRead More ...

One of the the things that can put parents who are raising bilingual children off the most – aside from their kid not responding back in the target language – is when they start mixing languages. Our first thought is that our child is falling “behind” in terms of language acquisition, but nothing can be further from the truth. My girl is almost five years old now and is very aware that she’s about to start a new stage inRead More ...

Editor’s note: During the next few weeks, we’re going to be doing things a bit differently here as Ana and I concentrate in meeting the deadline for the forthcoming SpanglishBaby book. We hope you bear with us. Because we’ve been around for almost three years (wow! when did that happen?), this week we’ll be sharing some classic posts from when it all got started. This post was originally published on February 3, 2009.  In most parts of the world, beingRead More ...

Before Vanessa started preschool a couple of months after she turned two, I often wondered how she was going to survive for four hours surrounded solely by English.  I worried that others would think she had no manners because even though she already understood the concept of “gracias” and “por favor,” she knew nothing about “thanks” and “please.” I explained the situation to her teachers and they reassured me everything would be fine. You see, up until then, her lifeRead More ...