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With the rise of dual language education in the U.S., have bilingual children become a commodity? In other words, are children who walk into the dual language classroom already speaking two languages possessing a highly valued commodity: bilingualism? The question, though, still remains, whose bilingualism is valued? Is it the “middle class” students bilingualism or is it those students who come from “lower class” homes? To distinguish between “middle” and “lower” I’d like to clarify how I am referring toRead More ...

“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 ...

If you grew up like me, you remember being pushed to give an abrazo to relatives you didn’t remember or who just plain gave you the heeby jeebies. I survived all those awkward moments, but I’m not planning to put my children through them. When Ana recently posted about piercing her daughter’s ears, it was the occasion for our first disagreement (friendly, of course). In explaining my reasons for not piercing my girls’ ears, I referred to my belief in bodily autonomy.Read More ...

We’ve spent the last four days introducing you to our recently chosen regular contributors. Today, we bring you our fifth one. But before we let you meet her, we’d like to recap who the first four ones are and what you can expect to read in their posts. Chelsea – a 20-something single mom of a little boy she’s raising bilingual even when Spanish is not her first language! Susan – a non-native Spanish speaker mother of two boys she’sRead More ...

Happy 2010 to all of you! After a much needed break, SpanglishBaby is back in full force! Since we’re starting a new decade and will be celebrating our first anniversary next month, we’ve decided to make a few changes to our growing online community. Although we’ll reveal most of them at a later time, we are at this time announcing our call for monthly paid contributors. What we’re looking for: Whether you’ve been following us since we published our firstRead More ...