We are excited to share our favorite bilingual and bicultural Holiday gifts with you! As we do every year, we’ve gathered some of the best regalitos of the season to feature in our 2013 Holiday Gift Guide for Bilingual Kids. This very unique gift guide includes Toys with English and Spanish features, our Favorites (De todo un poco) and Ana and Roxana’s Picks - our co-founders and experienced bilingual moms share their must-haves. Plus, check out the non profit organizations we’re featuring, spread the love this holiday season and donate to those who need it the most.

Click here to check out (and share!) SpanglishBaby’s 2013 Holiday Gift Guide for Bilingual Kids!

The Giveaway!

You know we love to share the love, so to celebrate the holidays we have a huge giveaway of some of our favorite items from our  2013 Holiday Gift Guide for Bilingual Kids!  ONE lucky winner will get one of each of these gifts featured below. The total value of this prize is over $450 USD!!

Looking for a decorative, yet educational and classy gift? Customizable World Maps by Children Inspire Design are perfect for a child’s room or anywhere in the house, really! Place your heart anywhere in the world where your’s belongs… (ARV $60.00)

Baby Alive Baby All Gone Bilingual by Hasbro - By holding her wrist down for a few seconds you can switch from English to Spanish! Doll comes with an outfit, bananas, spoon, bowl and a sippy cup. So sweet! (ARV $36.95)

The Dual Language Translator by Ingenio is perfect for your preschool aged kid. It includes 17 double-sided cards with useful everyday words including numbers, shapes, weather and much more. ¡Vamos a aprender español! (ARV $16.99)

We just love MamaYala’s creations! With the MamaYala Flash Cards  the whole family can play and learn vocabulary from Latin America and Spain. Includes a 100% cotton & customizable carrying bag, ¡Qué cute! (ARV $15.95)

You and your familia are going to love the Celebrations Around the World Activity Box by Lakeshore. You will have materials to celebrate five holidays: Cinco de Mayo, Kwanzaa, Diwali, Chinese New Year and Independence Day.  How cool is that?! (ARV $34.99)

The Orphaned Earring is a non-profit blog dedicated to bringing arts and crafts, school supplies as well as year-round festivities to four orphanages in Latin America, Nicaragua, Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico through the sales of hand-made bracelets from donated orphaned earrings. The winner will receive a set of two bracelets. (ARV $15.00)

For kids ages 3-6 Ladybug en español is an excellent reading tool, plus your child will love the illustrations! Read our review A Magazine for Children: Ladybug en Español. The winner will receive a one-year subscription of both the print and digital publications of Ladybug en español, Ask en español and Babybug en español. (ARV of over $150 USD)

As soon as you arrive home from the hospital play Spanish lullabies to your sweet baby with  Twilight Turtle Tunes! With wireless Bluetooth technology you can get the Premium app (available for $1.99) and play your mix of canciones de cuna to soothe your precious bebé. (Prize only includes one Twilight Turtle Tunes, Premium app not included.) (ARV $51.95)

For ages 3-12 Baking Around The World Kit by Handstandkids is the perfect gift for kids who love to cook and bake (and for those who might like to!) With recipes from around the world, our young bakers will enjoy learning about other cultures’ sweets. Yummy! (ARV $25.00)

Lanugo — La Sinfonía de… includes a unique personalized CD with your child’s name sang in each fun & engaging song! Plus the CD comes with your child’s name printed on it, as well as with a set of stickers — we love it! (ARV $14.99)

Se habla Spanglish Tee by Dos Borreguitas - We can’t say the word Spanglish enough so we’d like to wear it as well! This makes a great gift for your mamá, hija, tía, or anyone in your Spanglish familia! (ARV $20.00)

Little Passports‘ mission is to inspire children to learn about the world. Kids can get a package every month with country-specific souvenirs, stickers, photos, activity sheets and much more! Recommended for ages 5-10 years old. Yes, you can raise a world traveler and explorador! Winner will receive a 1-month subscription. (ARV $10.95)

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This is no ordinary flashcard app. It comes with preset words and pictures for each letter (in English), but you can add or edit them. You can even add pictures and recordings. We chose to leave the English and add a new Spanish flashcard for each letter. My son thought it was so cool that he could include pictures of himself and his toys, and loved recording his own voice to say things like “H para helicóptero.” 

Some flashcard apps can be complicated, but My A-Z is so easy to edit and use. It allows for creativity – use any words you can come up with! – and learning simultaneously. The app is versatile and affordable, and can be customized to your family’s languages.

Find My A-Z  in iTunes

Available for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad

Recommended for ages 1-7

Price: $1.99

Check out more from Night & Day Studios on their website, Facebook, and Twitter.

Being a monolingual household with bilingual aspiration requires a lot of tools. Any chance I have to expose the kids to my family’s language is imperative to our success. We love using Spanish language media; television and mobile apps have been invaluable in creating a bilingual environment while my husband is at work. But, for times when I don’t want my toddler consumed in technology, having access to educational tools that support bilingualism is another avenue of reinforcing our Spanish speaking skills.

Bebe Bilingual is a collection of educational tools and gifts for children around the world. The collection of bilingual products, such as flash cards and placemats, all decorated with whimsical art created by designer, Kimberly Schwede. These products teach your child the fundamentals of colors, numbers, animals and food in both English and Spanish or French.

The flash cards are printed on thick card stock, holding up to my toddler’s sticky fingers. The art is adorable, yet chic in design. And I love that these products are truly bilingual, with English on one side and Spanish on the other. No excuses from my English speaking husband, and my daughter still gets the practice in identifying numbers, letters and animals.

The educational 2-sided placemat makes the perfect gift for kids of all ages! Kids can learn numbers and food in Spanish. I especially love learning the names of ocean animals in Spanish; some of which I didn’t even know!

Bebe Bilingual products are safe, fun and effective in creating an atmosphere in which my child can grow and learn in bilingualism. It brings me so much joy to see her recognize, not only numbers, on sight – but in Spanish!

The Giveaway!

We are giving away one Bebe Bilingual Spanish Color+Numbers placemat OR a set of Spanish Color+Number flash cards (winners choice). Just visit the Bebe Bilingual Etsy store and leave us a comment telling us which product you liked and why.

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Do you know what’s your kid’s favorite letter? It’s the first letter in their name!

That is a letter that they usually recognize even before they fully know the alphabet. We can use this for an activity that will increase vocabulary and sharpen their reading skills even at an early age.

All you need is a set of 3” by 5” index cards, a box to store them, a book and something to write with. If you are reading to multiple children with different initials you will need to keep separate sets of flash cards for each of them. If you are raising bilingual kids you may also want to keep separate sets of flashcards for each language, and you will need a bilingual book or books.

1. Pick a book that your kid is familiar with. As your read the story, point out all the words that start with her initial by saying something like this: “Mira, ardilla empieza con A, como Andrea” when reading in Spanish, or “Look, apple starts with A, like Andrea!” when reading in English. Then write the word in an index card if you haven’t done so and put it in the box. If your kid is old enough she may write the word herself.
2. The next day repeat the exercise, but rather than finding words in a book, find objects around the house that start with your kid’s initial.
3. On the third day, ask your kid to pick any five flash cards from the box and ask him to come up with a story using all five. If he is old enough to write it, ask him to do so. Do this throughout the day. Every set of five flash cards that he picks will trigger a different story, greatly developing his imagination.
4. If you want, repeat the activity for other letters, maybe the initials of other family members.

I think that you will find this activity far more effective than traditional flashcard-based methods that rely on rote memorization and repetition. The words in your flashcards will be fully contextualized and will not be just random entities. They will all start with letters that your kids can readily identify and, by using them as building blocks for their own stories and not just in isolation, these words will come alive and gain an additional layer of context that will help your kids incorporate them into their vocabulary.

I hope you and your kids enjoy and learn a lot from this activity.

Click here for the printable version of this activity.

Special thanks to Heritage Language for providing this activity. Visit their site for bilingual books and resources.

Photo credit: stevendepolo