Once again, Disney has come up with a new way to excite kids! One of their most beloved animated movies, Toy Story, is now the theme of an app that will keep your kids busy for hours. Toy Story: Story Theater  allows kids to use characters from the movie (Buzz, Woody, Jessie, and more) and various settings and props to “direct” their own short films. The possibilities are endless.

First, practice placing characters and recording scenes using the Free Play option. Then, once you’re ready for your directing debut, go on to Story Play to get started on the real thing.

Save as many recorded stories as you want, and then choose the best one to submit to Disney’s Story Theater Fest contest. The creator of the video with the most votes will win a trip to Disneyland Resort and be honored at the D23 Expo in August. To ensure that your family has a chance to win this fabulous prize, be sure to submit entries to the Disney Learning Facebook page by June 23rd.

Bilingual kids can have even more fun with this app by recording stories in whichever language they please. Disney will accept story submissions in both English and Spanish.

Find Toy Story: Story Theater in iTunes

Available for iPhone and iPad

Recommended for all ages

Price: $2.99

This is our fourth year celebrating El Día de los Niños/El Día de los libros which happens on or around April 30 around the entire country. In honor of this very special day — because what could be better than celebrating kids and books, right? — we have put together a full week of reading related posts geared specifically towards bilingual children as well as an AMAZING giveaway that will allow one family to build its own bilingual home library for their kids!

We believe wholeheartedly in the power of reading when raising bilingual children, but we also know how frustrating it can be to find quality bilingual and Spanish books in the United States. From experience, I do have to say the offerings have gotten much better since my daughter was born almost six years ago and if you’ve been with us for a while you know that we’ve shared all those finds with you either through our ReadMe series or, more recently, in our Books & Libros category.

Another one of the worries we’ve all shared in this blog is how to go about teaching our bilingual children how to read in Spanish. Or even whether we should do this or not. As you may remember, I worried about this quite a bit before Vanessa entered Kinder as I was told by many that she should learn to read in her mother tongue, which I consider to be Spanish. I ended up not doing anything about it and once Vanessa learned how to read in English at school, she basically just came home and started transferring those skills into Spanish. But how does that actually happen? We hope to give you the answers this week.

We’ll also have some posts related to libraries and how to put them to good use as well as ideas to keep in mind when creating your own home bilingual library. Oh, and just like I promised, I also plan on sharing that list of suggestions I got from the librarian at the dual language immersion school I went to back in Peru when I was a child.

We’ve worked very hard to put together this week Celebrating Bilingual Readers and we can’t wait to share all of it with you… especially the AMAZING prize we’ll be giving away to one lucky family!

THE GIVEAWAY

Entering this giveaway is super easy! All you have to do is go to our Facebook page and upload a photo of your child’s favorite bilingual or Spanish book by May 6, 2012. Make sure you upload the picture via the contest app and NOT directly on the wall since that violates Facebook promotion guidelines. Go to this link here to land directly on the contest wall.

The winning family will be chosen at random (1 Grand prize winner) and this is what they’ll win to start their own bilingual children’s library at home:

• $50 worth of books from Heritage Language
• $50 worth of books from Bilingual Readers
• $50 worth of books from Lectura Books
• $20 worth of books from Little Pim
• Over $80 worth of books and Audio CDs from Pacific Learning
• Over $30 worth of bilingual educational games from Ingenio
• A BRAND NEW KINDLE FIRE!

 
We’ll also select three more winners to receive a copy of our book, Bilingual is Better, to be published on September 4, but now available for pre-order on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Enter the Celebrating Bilingual Readers Contest HERE and click on the suggested Tweet below to share the news with your friends!

SpanglishBaby giveaway $300 in bilingual books & a Kindle Fire! Upload pic of ur #BilingualKids fave book. Details: http://bit.ly/I3kTRy 

¡Buena suerte! 

Previous Grand Prize Winner Laurie Isop’s English-Spanish bilingual book, How Do You Hug a Porcupine? (¿Cómo abrazas a un puercoespín?), is being featured inside three million specially-marked boxes of Cheerios this Spring. Ron Rauss of Warrenton, Va. has officially been named the Grand Prize Winner of the 2010 New Author Contest and will have his winning story Can I Just Take a Nap? distributed inside Cheerios cereal boxes next spring. Yours could be next!

The Cheerios® New Author Contest, provides a unique opportunity for aspiring writers of children’s books. One Grand Prize Winner will receive a $5,000 cash prize and a possible publishing deal with Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing, in addition to having his or her book featured inside Cheerios cereal boxes nationwide.

Contest is open now through July 15, 2011.  Entrants must write and submit an original story, in either English or Spanish, suitable for children ages three to eight. For more information and how to enter, visit: www.spoonfulsofstoriescontest.com.

Cheerios also has other exciting news: “In conjunction with the launch of this year’s New Author Contest, Cheerios plans to donate 100,000 new books through its charitable partner, First Book.  As part of its Spoonfuls of Stories® program, Cheerios works with First Book to get high quality, award winning books in the hands of children in need. Since the program’s inception in 2002, Cheerios has given away more than 50 million children’s books free inside cereal boxes. Cheerios has also donated $3.5 million to the nonprofit First Book® to get books to children from low-income families.”

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 in the project we ended up choosing. Today, as we’re getting ready to celebrate the 15th anniversary of El Día de los niños/El Día de los libros at the end of the month, it thrills us to no end to be able to announce what we finally came up with: My Bilingual School Library Contest.

While our children are not yet school-aged, we’re aware of the huge need dual language elementary schools, schools with ELL programs and those that teach Spanish to their students at the elementary level have in terms of reading material in Spanish (or bilingual). We’ve heard from many teachers in these schools that they have such small budgets that they end up bringing their own bilingual or Spanish books to share with their students. We believe so strongly in the importance of literacy when raising bilingual children that we decided to help change this by stocking one bilingual school’s library with as many books as we could get.

To that end, we’ve joined forces with some of the major bilingual/Spanish publishing houses we’ve been working with in the last two years and they’ve graciously agreed to donate a total of $500 worth of books to ONE very lucky bilingual school library.

To enter this contest, we’re asking each school to have either their second or third graders come up with a poster celebrating Día. Once it’s completed, we’d like it to be emailed to us together with a short paragraph explaining why their school should win this contest and what winning would mean to them.

We will be accepting entries for My Bilingual School Library Contest from today until May 8th, 2011 May 15th, 2011. Then, we’ll upload all the submissions that follow the guidelines and we’ll open up the voting process so that people can vote for their favorite entry once a day for five days. Once we close the voting period, we’ll tabulate the votes to find out which school will be winning $500 worth of bilingual and Spanish books for its library.

If your children go to a dual language school, you are a teacher at one, or you know a school that would benefit from My Bilingual School Library Contest, we urge you to encourage them to enter. Our hope is that this book contest will give Spanish teachers an opportunity to foment their students’ love for reading in Spanish by providing them with a variety of books to choose from.

We’d like to thank the following publishing houses for believing in us and in this worthy project. Without their support, My Bilingual School Library Contest would not be possible. ¡Muchísimas gracias!

Children’s Book Press

Arte Público Press

Cinco Puntos Press

Bilingual Readers

Lectorum

Lorito Books

Groundwood Books

BrickHouse Education

Candlewick Press

and

Cheerios Spoonful of Stories

For all the rules and regulations for My Bilingual School Library Contest, please go here or click the banner above.

You can check out my Crepas de Cajeta Made Easy recipe, or Roxana’s wildly popular Banana-Peanut Butter Quesadillas for some inspiration!

Some of the tips & tricks being shared that I’ve already found useful for our Culture of Food recipes are:

• Spraying the inside of your food processor with PAM to make clean-up easier.
• Spraying the inside of a measuring cup with PAM so that sticky ingredients such as syrups and molasses slide right out and there’s no need to scrape.
• Lightly spray oven racks with PAM for easier sliding out. I know my oven can use this one!
• This one is non-cooking related, but I will definitely pass the tip along to my husband:  spray PAM on soccer cleats before playing so that mud won’t stick in between.

Now that we’ve talked so much about all the ways to use PAM, we want 25 of you to take four cans home.  Yes…that’s 25 winners of a set of four cans of PAM.  All you need to do to win it is head over to the PAM Top Tips Contest Facebook page and tell us which of the tips that have already been submitted is your favorite. The first 25 qualifying comments will automatically win!

This giveaway ends as soon as the 25 entries are received or by February 7 at midnight EST, whichever comes first.  You must have a valid US address to enter.

Disclosure: This post is part of a sponsored series to help promote PAM’s Top Tip Contest. We also received PAM products and promotional material from ConAgra to assist in preparing the posts. All opinions are our own.

Photo by cooljinny

We’re back!!! I know we’ve been kind of sketchy with our weekly Yo Quiero Links posts, but it’s been a pretty busy summer. Actually, TOMORROW you’ll get to find out what has kept us so busy lately. We can’t wait to share our latest news with you, so we hope you don’t miss our BIG ANNOUNCEMENT

In the meantime, here are some pretty cool links we’d like to share with you:

1) Webwire.com: Study Shows Bilingual are Unable to ‘turn off’ a Language Completely – “According to a recent study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, it appears humans are not actually capable of “turning off” another language entirely. Psychologists Eva Van Assche, Wouter Duyck, Robert Hartsuiker and Kevin Diependaele from Ghent University found that knowledge of a second language actually has a continuous impact on native-language reading.”

2) Bilingual Readers: Emotional Bilingualism – “Most of us would agree that there is a strong link between language and emotions. We use words to help us express our emotions, but those very same words also help us to define what we’re feeling. This is true for monolinguals, but those of us who speak more than one language know that different languages often allow us to define our feelings in a different way based on the specific nuances each language has to offer.”

3) Multilingual Mania: Social Networking and Virtual Multilingual Communities – “It’s easy to feel isolated when you are working in the field of bilingual or multilingual education. Bilingual teachers are often the minority in schools, considering the fact that the majority of English learners in the public school system are placed in English settings. Bilingual teachers grow accustomed to attending staff development that is primarily geared towards teachers in English settings. The lack of school, district and community support systems for bilingual teachers is astounding and can be emotionally and professionally grueling to dedicated bilingual teachers.”

4) Wanna Jugar with Migo?: John De Mado Interview – “I learned a lot by interviewing John De Mado. It helped me understand the language acquisition process better. It made me feel better about teaching my children Spanish and the mistakes I make. He talked about how we think language is “fossilized” like set in stone and never changes, whereas, it is constantly changing. If my children or I make a mistake, it doesn’t mean they can’t change it later.”

5) MyLatinoNews.com: CNN Presents Latino in America Anchored by Soledad O’Brien – “CNN will extend its acclaimed “…in America” series of documentaries with a two-night, four-hour event, Latino in America, this October. Reported by anchor and special correspondent Soledad O’Brien, the ambitious documentary initiative examines the growing diversity of America, revealing insight into a changing nation on the eve of the U.S. census that is expected to officially confirm that Latino Americans are the largest minority group within the country.”

TWO CONTESTS WORTH ENTERING!!

6) MielPura.org: Miel a mi Manera – “Para animar a padres y niños de todas partes a probar y descubrir los múltiples usos de la miel, especialmente en los que se relacionan con el regreso a la escuela, National Honey Board se ha unido con la revista Ser Padres, la fuente principal de información para padres Hispanos en los Estados Unidos, para presentar el concurso “Miel a mi Manera”. Los consumidores pueden enviar su receta preferida con miel en dos categorías: (1) una receta de una comida o snack para niños o (2) su receta favorita con el uso creativo de la miel (por ejemplo, para el dolor de garganta, para bebidas deportivas, etc.). El ganador de recetas de comidas/snacks para niños ganará $1,000 y el ganador de usos creativos recibirá $500.”

7) Baskin Robbins: Ice Cream & Cake Dance Contest – “Shake your moneymaker and show us how you do the Ice Cream & Cake Dance. Watch the demo video to see the basic steps, then download the Ice Cream & Cake song and create your own version in 90 seconds or less. Come back and click on the “Enter” tab to register and submit your video. You could win $10,000.”

Don’t forget to check out our big announcement tomorrow. We know you’re going to LOVE it!!