¡Hola!

Welcome to the new and improved SpanglishBaby! This has been in the works for several months now and we couldn’t be happier with the results. Hope you feel the same way!

If you’re new here, this will serve as a guide of sorts to keep in mind when navigating our site. If you’re not new, we still have all the great content as before, PLUS a few surprises.

One of the main things you’ll notice is that our new design is much cleaner and easier to navigate. After three years – our anniversary is in February – we have managed to amass a serious amount of content and we felt like a lot of it was lost in our prior version.

For starters, we’ve moved our main categories (check out the drop-down menus) to the navigation bar above, so that you can hopefully find what you’re looking for fairly quickly and easily. As you can see, our very popular Finds section is up there with a drop-down menu that includes everything from Activities & Printables to Educational Apps. By the way, you can expect lots more Apps reviews from now on.

A Few Surprises

• Because SpanglishBaby wouldn’t be what it is without our amazing contributors, they now have a special place to call their own: Meet La Familia.

 
• Under the Culture tab, you will find The Culture of Food, Cultural Travel (which has become a pretty popular category) and Bicultural Vida, the new category we’ve created for all those posts about what it’s really like to raise bilingual and bicultural children. In the Culture of Food, you can now search for recipes by country or region, which I think is super cool. Although the pressure’s on to make sure there are more recipes from Peru, mi patria!

 
• We’ve also added a whole new section dedicated to the topic of Bilingual Education, as you can see up above. Bilingual Ed is such an integral part of raising bilingual children that we figured it deserved it’s own separate section. We’re going to be adding a lot of content there, as Ana goes through the process of getting Camila into a dual language school in the fall for kindergarten. But the very best part of this section, in my opinion, is our user-generated searchable database of schools that offer any sort of instruction in Spanish. Searchable by location, our hope is that this becomes the repository of this type of info whether you’re looking for a preschool, a private after-school program or a public dual language immersion elementary school. Please help us accomplish that by submitting the schools you know!

 
• Finally, we’ve revamped our Ask an Expert section making it easier to find answers by sorting them by expert. Also, if you have a question, all you have to do is fill out this quick Aks an Expert form to submit it. Plus, we’re are super happy to announce that starting today, Julia Pimsleur Levine, the force behind the fabulous and extremely useful Little Pim products, will be one of our regular experts. Please help us welcome her to the SpanglishBaby Familia and read her answer to one reader’s question who’s concerned she’s hurting her son’s speech development by speaking only Spanish at home.

 
There’s lots more, but it’s probably better if you just explore away. We do want to know what you think, so PLEASE give us some feedback. We value your honest opinion and appreciate any comments that will make navigating SpanglishBaby an even better experience.

¡A explorar!

Ana + Roxana

{Photo credit: cameronparkins}