The first is La Fiesta de Halloween ($3.99), a great story about vampires, monsters, spiders, and more getting ready to have a Halloween party at a haunted house. The ghosts provide the tunes and the skeletons dance.

In La aprendiz de bruja ($1.99), a young girl is learning what it takes to become a witch. She mixes up potions and learns to fly on a broomstick. She practices spells on her cat and accidentally turns him into all kinds of odd things.

Lastly, Cazavampiros ($2.99) is a story about hunting for a vampiress in a creepy castle. It’s fun to search each room for clues and finally find the girl who’s guilty of stealing candies.

As with all PlayTales books, these Halloween stories are interactive and you can choose to read them yourself or have them read aloud. PlayTales offers options for ages 1-12, but these Halloween stories are appropriate for ages 4 and up.

All titles can be downloaded through the PlayTales app for the individual prices listed above, or through PlayTales Gold! app with a monthly, semi-annual, or annual subscription. PlayTales is available for Apple and Android.

NOTE: To find Spanish titles, go to “Store,” change language to español, then perform a search.

You know we always want to keep you up-to-date when it comes to our favorite companies launching products in Spanish, and here’s a great one!

Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit educational organization, today announced the launch of Sesame Street books on the iBooks Store. A collection of more than 60 Sesame Street books is available for the first time to iBooks users in 51 countries. The range of Sesame Street books includes fan favorites and classics such as The Monster at the End of This Book, Elmo Loves You and How to Be a Grouch, now available at iTunes.com/SesameStreetBooks.

Out of the more than 60 Sesame Street titles, only three are in Spanish, but we’ll celebrate that and urge you to download like crazy to make a statement of just how eager we are to purchase quality books in Spanish for our kids.

These are the three Sesame Street books in Spanish on the iBooks store. We’ve hyperlinked them to their direct iTunes store page to make it easy download them. Note that I wasn’t able to download them directly from iBooks on my iPad, so this is the best way for now.

¡Elmo te Quiere a Ti!

¿Qué te Hace Reir?

Un Picnic Perfecto 

The book Elmo and Rosita Read a Recipe is not in Spanish, but does include Spanish terms, so it’s perfect for our Spanglish children!

Additionally, iBooks has chosen Sesame’s Which Witch is Which?, a story that includes read-and-listen audio, as the Book of the Week. This Sesame Street Halloween story can be downloaded for free through October 15.

Let us know if you download these and how you like them! And feel free to leave a comment telling Sesame Street how much we love books in Spanish for our kids!

There is nothing like a good bedtime story and a cup of milk before bed. Bedtime routines are a great way to help our kids wind down and practice español in a relaxed environment. It’s not just the ritual that helps our niños, or us, sleep better. Steve James, Executive Director of the California Milk Processor Board (CMPB) says that “the amino-acid trypotophan naturally found in milk helps people relax and improve the quality of sleep which gives parents yet another reason to make sure it’s part of kids’ bedtime routine.”

Did you know that, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), children’s sleeping patterns are linked to their overall academic success? When our kids sleep better it results in improved attention span in the classroom and reduced absences and tardiness during the school year. Makes sense right? That’s why the CMPB, the creator of GOT MILK? and TOMA LECHE, has teamed up with International Latino Book Award winner and acclaimed children’s author, Jorge Argueta, to launch the 2013 Bedtime Ritual campaign. “This partnership with TOMA LECHE is an opportunity to pass along our language and rich Latino traditions to young boys and girls everywhere. There’s no better way to prepare for the day ahead than with a glass of milk and a bedtime story!” says Argueta.

TOMA LECHE is airing 30-second TV spots that encourage families to have a nightly routine with their kids and Salvadoran writer and poet Argueta will share some of his award-winning work and introduce seven bilingual milk-themed bedtime children’s stories that were especially created for this campaign. The best part is that they are available for free as downloadable stories at Otros Cuentos! If you’re more of a mobile user the stories are also available through Google Play.

For more information, news, tips and bedtime stories, visit Toma Leche, Otros Cuentos.

I love Sylvan Dell Publishing’s Fun eReader Picture Books App! The eBooks are a great way to introduce your children to nature, math, and science in a fun and entertaining way. I have used it at home with my own children and in my classroom, and both my children and my students loved it!

The eBooks stream from the cloud or can be downloaded to your iPad for traveling. There are over 90 books available, and best of all, there is a Spanish language option! There are also a variety of ways for reading the book too. It is possible to choose either the Read-to-Me, Read-to-Myself, or AutoPlay option. My kids love that they can listen to the stories and flip through the pages of the iPad stories all on their own.

The books are filled with beautiful illustrations and cover science and math subjects in a way that is interesting and fun to learn. At the back of each book, there are fun educational sections that enable parents and teachers to help further explore the facts and information covered in the book. The “For Creative Minds” section presents amazing facts about strange animals, faraway places, earth, space, science, and even math concepts. I especially love that the app provides parents and teachers with teaching activity guides. These guides contain pre-reading and post reading questions, activities such as word searches, vocabulary puzzles, and even map activities to help further learning.  The app even has on-line quizzes that can test for reading comprehension.

I love this app! My children are absolutely thrilled with the books and love learning about different animals, the ocean, and outer space.  I love that through reading stories, they are exploring science and math concepts. I have also used this app in my Spanish classes, and the students were very enthusiastic to learn and read with this fun app.

The Sylvan Dell Publishing’s eReader is a great way to make learning fun! The beautifully illustrated eBooks will captivate, entertain, and educate your child, and best of all, the stories can be read in Spanish too!

The Giveaway!

We are giving away ONE annual subscription to a personal eLibrary, a $70 ARV, to the Sylvan Dell eBooks iPad app Fun eReader to one lucky winner. The subscription will get you iPad access and also access through your computer and other devices at home to all the ebooks in the library. All you have to do is visit Sylvan Dell eBooks page, check out the “test drive” option and tell us what you like best about this app. Then, enter the rafflecopter below.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

This game is surprisingly simple, and incredibly addicting. Watch the skeletons pop up in different boxes, wait to see the icon for which element of the ofrenda they need – flowers, pan de muerto, prayer, or tequila – and then race to give it to them before they go back underground. Sometimes, two or three of them will pop up at one time! And watch out for the bar at the top that fills as you miss opportunities to feed them; that indicates they are “pulling your feet.”

Find Día de Muertos on iTunes

Available for iPad and iPhone

Recommended for ages 12 and up (mild alcohol reference)

Price: FREE

Check out WashaWasha on Facebook and Twitter

Calavera Abecedario: A Day of the Dead Alphabet Book by Jeanette Winter

A fun take on the interactive storybook, this app allows you to record yourself reading the story of Don Pedro Linares, a famous Mexican calavera maker. The narrative is in English, but the latter half of the story is the abecedario with words like candelera and tortillera. The illustrations are beautiful, and kids will love to hear their parents’ voices (or their own!) coming from the app.

Find Calavera Abecedario on iTunes

Available for iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android

Recommended for ages 4 and up

Price: $7.99

Day of the Dead – Experience the Tradition by University of Notre Dame

For anyone who isn’t familiar with the Día de Muertos traditions and history, this is a great crash course. It’s a beautifully designed, interactive textbook (in English) with embedded videos and pictures that flip and spin. It would serve as a wonderful resource for any children doing a school project about the Mexican holiday. It’s also just a fun thing to read together at home to incite discussion about the theme of death in a positive light.

Find Day of the Dead – Experience the Tradition on iTunes

Available for iPad and iPhone

Recommended for ages 4 and up

Price: FREE

Check out Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies website

Day of the Dead Me by Simply Sweet Apps

I thought this would just be car entertainment for the kids, but then I spent forever taking pictures of myself to get the perfect frame for a “dead me” face. Take a photo of anyone, edit it with traditional tools, then place all kinds of fun and creepy decorations on top: hats, roses, painted eyes, and masks. Halloween and Día de Muertos in one cool app!

Find Day of the Dead Me on iTunes

Available for iPhone and iPod Touch

Recommended for ages 4 and up

Price: $0.99

Check out Simply Sweet Apps on Twitter and their website. Also, see this video for a how-to.

Rosita y Conchita by Peek ‘n Play Story Apps

We’ve been anxiously waiting for this app to hit the iTunes store because we’re already huge fans of the bilingual book, Rosita y Conchita by Erich Haeger and Eric Gonzalez of Muertoons. This interactive app beautifully brings to life the storybook tale of two gemelas  – Rosita y Conchita — that were separated when Rosita passes away. On Day of the Dead, Conchita prepares an altar for her beloved sister and we go along with Rosita’s journey to find her way back home during the one day her spirit can breakthrough. The app allows your child to choose to listen to the rhyming story either in English or Spanish, or, if old enough, read the text on his own. Kids will also love tapping the screen to find the interactive delights and surprises on each page.

Find Rosita y Conchita on iTunes

Available for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad

Recommended for 4-7, 8-10

Price: $4.99

Check out Peek ‘ PlayStory Apps.

For more Day of the Dead goodies, check out all activities, videos, crafts, recipes, books and much more we’ve collected in this page and on Pinterest.

Just a super quick note to let all of you know that Amazon has launched it’s Tienda Kindle with 30,000 eBook titles in Spanish! For those of you who’ve been following us for a while, you know this is pretty huge since reading is one of the best ways of ensuring that are our children are not only bilingual but also biliterate.

I definitely still need to do a lot more navigating in the eBooks Kindle en Español site, but I’ve already found some pretty cool stuff, including a whole section dedicated to a collection of Dora the Explorer books in Spanish for the Kindle Fire. Although the children’s section has a lot of translated books, I’m pretty sure (and hopeful) it’ll keep on growing.

I haven’t always been a fan of e-Readers, but my husband bought a Kindle last year for school work and I decided to try it out. I’m still a huge lover of actual books — and I’m sure I always will be — but I truly like the convenience of reading on a Kindle and, with this new store, it looks like I’ll be introducing Vanessa to it shortly.

I absolutely love the prices, with many books at just .99 cents or even free if you’re an Amazon Prime member. But wait, even if you’re not you can still get your hands on over 1,000 classic titles for FREE! Here’s the first one I’m trying out: Cuentos, adivinanzas y refranes populares.

Go check it out for yourself and tell us what you think!

{Image by TheCreativePen}