literacy

I grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, where the only place I heard Spanish was within the walls of my high school. And what’s more, I took French! Eventually, I learned Spanish in college and then as a student in Venezuela and Cuba. While my first job out of college didn’t require Spanish at all, my second did. I worked at a nonprofit that partnered with public schools to provide literacy programs to elementary-aged kids. My students were almost allRead More ...

  For almost two years now, I’ve been taking Vanessa to a monthly Spanish children’s book club started by a bilingual mom I’m lucky to call my friend. While I’ll never get tired of raving about the benefits of joining a Spanish-speaking playgroup, once kids get a bit older and start school, it’s not as easy to participate in weekly meetups for the kids to be immersed in Spanish. Enter the idea of a Spanish children’s book club. If yourRead More ...

In my father’s grand tradition of celebrating Thanksgiving in April — or whenever else he felt like it — he and I didn’t celebrate my birthday in May. We did celebrate it with cake or maybe a family gathering. But I always got my big gift, the one I looked forward to all year, in July. Back in the eighties there was only one place to find books in English in Costa Rica — where I grew up. It wasRead More ...

After listening to a podcast of The Parent’s Journal with Bobbie Conner and her guest Tracey Wood (July 16, 2012), a children’s reading specialist, I realized I needed to stop dragging my pies and begin to investigate how to implicitly teach Sofía to read.  Yes, she’s only three-years-old, but really the reading process begins at birth (if not before) by constantly reading, rhyming, singing, reading, reading, and reading to our bebés. There are also many studies that indicated that children, who learnRead More ...

Curling up with our bilingual niños and a good book can be one of the best daily routines we could have. It allows us to interact with our kids in an educational and fun way. Even better if we’re reading to them en español! To celebrate the joy of reading and raising bilingual kids, we’ve joined forces with Mamiverse and their new channel Mamiverse Books to host an interactive Twitter party with great prizes! The main goal of this Twitter party will beRead More ...