reading

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 ...

My son Isaiah LOVES books, much like Roxana’s daughter. However, he is a bit younger (just turned 5) and is still learning the fundamentals of reading in English. Since starting at a Montessori preschool last fall, he has made leaps and bounds in his reading abilities and has a good handle on the basics. In addition to his English homework and the reading exposure he gets at school, I read to him in Spanish and English every day. I’m aRead More ...

  I have nothing against technology when raising bilingual children. Apps, online games and movies in Spanish are a great supplement in this journey — but they’re just that, a supplement. It is a mistake to think that just sitting your child in front of the television set to watch a show in Spanish or to let them mouse around with a bilingual computer game will expose them to the kind of vocabulary needed to become proficient in the minority language.Read More ...

An article published earlier this week in The New York Times titled “For Young Latino Readers, an Image Is Missing” has created a flurry of commentary about the dire need for more children’s books with which our Latino kids can identify. In other words, more children’s books with characters that look like them and with storylines that speak to them. While I would love nothing more than to see all Latino authors been given the opportunity to be published, I’m having aRead 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 ...