I can be a little bit strict when it comes to my boys and TV. Those of you who know me, have heard me talk about using little screen time as educational as possible. Just like my boys watching Spanish cartoons, when we received these DVDs in the mail, I said to them, “knock yourselves out!” They loved THE MAGIC SCHOOL BUS: REVVING UP (3 discs) and THE MAGIC SCHOOL BUS: IN A PICKLE. Sixteen fun episodes about science, perfect for ages 4-7, based on the series of books by Joanna Cole and illustrator Bruce Degen, AND a Spanish language option! This mamí definitely approves!

The first time my boys sat down to watch a few episodes of the new THE MAGIC SCHOOL BUS DVDs, my six-year-old was talking about microbes, energy and eggs for more than a couple of days!

I love how much there is to learn with these new DVDs; everything from the smallest cell to the largest galaxy in twelve never-before-available episodes of the Emmy Award®-winning TV series in THE MAGIC SCHOOL BUS: REVVING UP. Each of the three discs in the set – “Under Construction,” “Getting Energized” and “Cracks a Yolk” – contains three new episodes focusing from computers and electricity to city critters and desert adaptation. And each DVD also contains a special bonus episode adding up to more than four-and-a-half hours of educational fun!

Then there is the IN A PICKLE, my son’s favorite DVD! Viewers who hop aboard the bus for IN A PICKLE are sure to find out across four never-before-released episodes including the title episode about microbes, along with “Meets Molly Cule,” “Makes a Stink” about smell and “Meets the Rot Squad” which covers decomposition.

The titles, the content and the animation are all very attractive to kids. I wish I would have had something like this when I was a student. I am learning more about science with my boys! For more information on these title or any other Scholastic Storybook Treasures release, visit New Kideo. Also, visit New Kideo, the online home for the DVD line, at their Facebook page.

You have to get your copies! REVVING UP is $24.95 and IN A PICKLE is $12.95, or you can enter our awesome GIVEAWAY!!

The Giveaway!

We are giving away THE MAGIC SCHOOL BUS: REVVING UP (3 discs) and THE MAGIC SCHOOL BUS: IN A PICKLE, a total of sixteen fun episodes to ONE lucky winner (U.S. ONLY). Just leave us a comment letting us know who you’d like to share these DVD’s with and enter the rafflecopter below.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

While I don’t really have to worry about Vanessa not reading during the summer — she’s a bookworm, just like her mom — I must say I do love the idea behind iVillage PBS KIDS Summer Reading Community Challenge, which starts tomorrow, is free and lasts six weeks.

The way it works is pretty simple. Basically you just sign up and you’ll start getting daily emails with literacy-building tips and activities from experts at PBS KIDS and Scholastic, two of our favorites!

After you sign up you will also get suggestions for books as well as discounts, free downloads of PBS KIDS shows and a chance to win $1,000 and other great prizes on a daily basis!

To get my family started with this challenge, PBS KIDS sent us a summer reading party kit which we shared with our friends from our bilingual playgroup last Friday. The timing was perfect because all of our kids had just finished a week-long summer camp where they were immersed in Spanish pretty much all day long. The reading party kit kit not only contained one book for each of the kids, but it also came with activity sheets, bookmarks, coloring sheets, stickers, progress charts, notebooks and markers. The best part? The book they sent is a Scholastic favorite in Spanish: ¡Compórtate, Pablo Picasso!

By the way, in case you didn’t know PBS Parents has a bookinder where you can go for help choosing books in Spanish or bilingual.

As you can see from the photos, the kids had a blast with all the goodies and they left our house all ready for the summer reading challenge!

How do you encourage your bilingual kids to read in the summer months?

Disclosure: I received a summer reading kit with materials to host a summer reading party as a PBS Kids Very Important Parent. No monetary compensation was received to host a party. As usual, all opinions are my own.

Image source: Molly Darling

BabyCenter en Español has released the results of yet another survey. This particular survey was about fathers and how they interact with their children. Here is the data that caught my eye:

Actividades preferidas que los papás disfrutan hacer con sus niños:

• Jugar con él: 60%
• Dormir con él: 18%
• Bañarlo: 13%
• Leerle un cuento: 1%
• Otra cosa: 9%

Source: BabyCenter en Español

Do you see that? Favorite activities for fathers to do with their children and “Read him/her a story” received only 1% of the vote… That disturbs me and I’ll tell you why.

When my younger son, (now 10 years old), started preschool, I volunteered a lot in the classroom. One project I ended up taking over was the “reading bags” … Basically each child had a cloth tote bag and they would take home two or three books in the bag each week. I would rotate the books out, talk with the kids to see if they had read the books or had been read to, find out their interests so I could choose books they’d be more likely to read, etc.

My son’s classroom was at least 90% Latino, (mostly first generation American, with parents being recent immigrants from Mexico), and so a lot of interesting things came into play. First, most of the books I had available in the classroom were in English and the kids were telling me that their parents couldn’t read the books to them. I requested more Spanish language books and once I got those, some of the kids seemed to be getting read to more often, although some still did not. Some of the challenges we faced included parents who couldn’t read well (or at all) even in their native Spanish, parents who didn’t have time or were too tired to read, and parents who didn’t see reading with their child as a valuable activity because they weren’t raised with books.

A couple of these children weren’t even sure how to hold a book when they started the school year, (they would hold it upside down and/or backward, flip the pages the wrong direction, etc.) Once I pinpointed the children who were not being read to, I volunteered more time to not just rotate the books in the bags, but to stay and read one-on-one with those children. I came close to tears sometimes because the way they snuggled into my lap and looked forward to this time together made me realize how many kids out there are missing out on something that is so incredibly valuable and absolutely free.

The benefits of reading to your children from a young age have been proven, but if one isn’t raised in a book reading household, the chances that they’ll read to their children are significantly lower. This is a problem for the Latino community in particular because although the BabyCenter survey refers to fathers, the truth is that even Latina mothers are less likely to read to their children than Caucasian/Anglo mothers.

Getting kids hooked on reading at an early age is especially important for boys, who are less likely to read for leisure than girls.

Even if you weren’t raised in a reading household, you can change that for your kids – read to them regularly and some day they will read to their children regularly – It’s that simple. You can set future generations of your family on a new path with this one act, (and you may even come to love reading yourself if you don’t already.)

Other ways to encourage reading in the Latino community

• Next time you’re invited to the birthday party of a niece/nephew or friend’s child, why don’t you gift that child a book? I always try to do this and my husband, Carlos, says that culturally books are not seen as “a good gift” – If you worry it will be perceived that way, choose a gift pack that includes a toy along with the book.

• Donate bilingual books to your local library and/or schools. Teachers love when people buy books for their classrooms through Scholastic.

• Tell people with young bilingual or Spanish-speaking children about Read Conmigo. It’s 100% free – Just sign up and a bilingual book is delivered to you each month in the mail.

• Support (with your money or time), programs in your community that teach illiterate adults how to read, (English or Spanish), as well as ESOL programs.

• Volunteer in the classroom – especially if you’re bilingual and can help meet a need not being met due to staff cuts and tight budgets. Teachers often love having their newsletter translated to Spanish so they have a better chance of keeping non-English-speaking parents informed. Ask your child’s teacher, or the local Elementary school how you can help.

• Get caught reading! Let your kids, nieces, nephews, neighborhood children, see you reading a book. If they admire you, this will affect their view of books and reading in a positive way.

• Other resources: Check out Mommy Maestra and this article by the author of Mommy Maestra, Monica Olivera, on Mamiverse: Improving Latino Children’s Literacy.

What do you think? Is the Latino community behind when it comes to teaching kids a love of books and reading? What are your experiences as a child and/or as a parent? Were you read to? Do you read to your kids?

I don’t know if it’s because she’s been exposed to both English and Spanish since she was born, but my daughter has always shown an interest in other languages. Last year I started exposing her to French by using the Little Pim line of products. One of her favorite things is a poster that shows how to say “hello” in different languages, which is exactly the topic of Say Hello! the Scholastic Club Leo book I decided to review this month.

The book tells the simple story of Carmelita and all the people she meets in her neighborhood on her way to her abuelita’s home. All the people are from different countries and so they say hello to Carmelita in their own language. There’s the lady at the French bakery, the neighbors from Kenya, the owners of a Japanese restaurant and so on. Vanessa was quick to point out that she already knew how to say “hello” in three languages: Spanish, English and French.

I like that through the story my children can not only learn how to say “hello” in different languages, but it also gives me an opportunity to talk to them about other cultures and peoples of the world. The colorful illustrations really help me do this and I love that they portray a diverse neighborhood because my children are not really exposed to anything like that.

I think this is the perfect book for those children growing up bilingual, but even more so for those who are not so they can be introduced to the notion that there are tons of other languages spoken throughout the world. The book is in English, but has Spanish phrases embedded in it — as well as a pronunciation guide of all the “hellos” at the end of the book.

The Giveaway

We’re giving away one copy of Say Hello! to one lucky winner.

To enter, all you have to do is leave us a comment telling us how you teach your children about other cultures and languages.

That’s all you have to do to enter this giveaway. If you want to up your chances at winning, then this is how you can get additional entries (only after you’ve completed the step above):

**Please leave a separate comment for each so we can count them and avoid mistakes.

1. Subscribe to receive blog updates and subscriber-only content via email and leave us an extra comment letting us know you did so or that you’re already a subscriber. Make sure to leave the comment using the same email you subscribed with.

2. Follow us on Twitter and tweet about this giveaway including a link to the post and @SpanglishBaby. Copy the link to the tweet in an additional comment on the giveaway’s post.

3. Like SpanglishBaby on Facebook and join a thriving community of parents.

This giveaway ends Wednesday, May 9 at 11:59 p.m. EST and is open to everyone with a U.S. mailing address over 18 years of age. Check out the Giveaway Rules.

As I’ve mentioned several times before, my daughter has been learning how to read in English at school and coming home and transferring what she’s learning into Spanish. Although we have tons of books in Spanish at home, we don’t really have a lot of books for early readers. I’m not a huge fan of translations and so I’ve kind of stayed away from those, so I was curious to see what Scholastic Club Leo‘s Paquete Amigos Favoritos — a set of three books specifically for children who are just learning how to read — was all about.

The packet includes the following titles:

• Clifford y los dinosaurios
• Hombre mosca conoce a chica mosca
• Bizcocho sale a pasear

Whenever I get more than one book, I don’t like to give them to my daughter all at once because she won’t concentrate on each one individually. This time was no exception. So I decided to give her the last one on the list above: Bizcocho sale a pasear.

I never imagined that she’d be so happy to get it, but it turns out that she’s seen and read other books from the series from her school’s library. In English, they’re called Biscuit and she couldn’t believe I’d gotten a version in Spanish. I’m not sure why it was, but she was simply ecstatic that she recognized the character and that she was able to read in Spanish a book with which she is familiar in English.

She was able to read the whole book all by herself even though it does contain a few difficult words such as simpático and revolcarse. She didn’t really get them the first time around, but that’s because she wants to read faster than what she currently can. She loves the book so much that she offers to read it to anybody willing to listen!

Just last week, I gave her the Hombre mosca conoce a chica mosca and although she didn’t recognize it, she has been really excited about reading it because it’s divided into chapters. Go figure!

I plan on giving her the Clifford one tomorrow. I’m sure she’ll love it too because we already have a few of these in Spanish.

The Giveaway

We’re giving away one Favorite Friends Pack in Spanish to one lucky winner.

To enter, all you have to do is leave us a comment telling us how you promote reading in your home.

That’s all you have to do to enter this giveaway. If you want to up your chances at winning, then this is how you can get additional entries (only after you’ve completed the step above):

**Please leave a separate comment for each so we can count them and avoid mistakes.

1. Subscribe to receive blog updates and subscriber-only content via email and leave us an extra comment letting us know you did so or that you’re already a subscriber. Make sure to leave the comment using the same email you subscribed with.

2. Follow us on Twitter and tweet about this giveaway including a link to the post and @SpanglishBaby. Copy the link to the tweet in an additional comment on the giveaway’s post.

3. Like SpanglishBaby on Facebook and join a thriving community of parents.

This giveaway ends Tuesday, April 10 at 11:59 p.m. EST and is open to everyone with a U.S. mailing address over 18 years of age. Check out the Giveaway Rules.

My daughter just experienced her first Scholastic Book Fair at school. I volunteered to work the fair a couple of days, not only because I wanted to help, but also because I wanted to see her in action. And, it was just as I expected, she was in book heaven! I helped her, and her little friends, fill out her wish list and a few days later we went back to the fair and got her a couple of the books on her list.

Since she had a few more books on there, I was really happy to find out that Scholastic Book Clubs has joined forces with Kellogg to make it easy to get free books. All you have to do is to purchase 2 participating Kellogg’s products exclusively sold at Walmart and redeem the special codes found inside each box online to download a $5 coupon. You can use the coupon for books or other products through Scholastic Book Clubs or at the Scholastic store online.

It’s that easy!

Please note that this special offer is available until July of next year (all codes must be entered by 7/1/12), so you have plenty of chances of growing your children’s library for virtually nothing.

The Giveaway

This giveaway is now closed. Congratulations to the winner:Monica!

To give you a head start, we’re giving away one nifty package to one lucky winner, which includes several participating Kellogg’s products, four Scholastic books (including two picture books and two chapter books) and a $15 Walmart gift card, so you can get even more participating products.

To enter, all you have to do is leave us a comment telling us about your “book nook” at home or where you like to read with your kids. 

That’s all you have to do to enter this giveaway. If you want to up your chances at winning, then this is how you can get additional entries (only after you’ve completed the step above):

**Please leave a separate comment for each so we can count them and avoid mistakes.

1. Subscribe to receive blog updates and subscriber-only content via email and leave us an extra comment letting us know you did so or that you’re already a subscriber. Make sure to leave the comment using the same email you subscribed with.

2. Follow us on Twitter and tweet about this giveaway including a link to the post and @SpanglishBaby. Copy the link to the tweet in an additional comment on the giveaway’s post.

3. Like SpanglishBaby on Facebook and join a thriving community of parents.

This giveaway ends Friday, October 14 at 11:59 p.m. EST and is open to everyone with a U.S. mailing address over 18 years of age. Check out the Giveaway Rules.

I won’t get tired of saying it: there’s a huge lack in the area of bilingual and Spanish board books for the littlest ones in the house — unless of course they’re brought from outside the U.S. Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks so because Children’s Book Press, one of our favorite multicultural publishing houses, recently announce its plans to start releasing bilingual board books for children ages 0-5.

The first book in their new series is My Colors, My World/Mis colores, mi mundo by Maya Christina Gonzalez. When I saw it was part of Club Leo’s Spring catalog, I immediately jumped at the opportunity to review it. (Coincidentally, several of you suggested I review this book when I asked for suggestions in the first post I wrote announcing my partnership with Scholastic as one of their Mom Blog Friends a couple of weeks ago.)

I’ve been a big fan of Maya and her work ever since I discovered her books at our local library. I got the opportunity to get to know her a little better when I interviewed her for an installment of ReadMe — in which I reviewed her book I Know the River Loves Me — and for a freelance article I worked on last year. She is superb and so is her bold work.

My Colors, My World/Mis colores, mi mundo was originally published as a picture book in 2007. Written and illustrated by Maya, it has won the prestigious Pura Belpré Honor Award for Illustration. Like the title clearly states, this is a journey through Little Maya’s world through color.

My son, Santiago, is learning about two or three words per day. His vocabulary is expanding at an amazing rate, in part, thanks to his older sister. Vanessa likes to climb into her brother’s crib in the morning and “read” to him or get him to repeat words. Just the other day, I heard her (over the baby monitor) trying to get him to repeat the names of the colors. When I walked into Santiago’s room a little while later, I realized she had picked up Maya’s board book — which I had read to them the night before — and she was using it to teach him the names of colors.

I can’t wait to discover all the other bilingual board books that will be published in this new series. Vanessa will be learning to read in a few months and I’d love for her to be able to read board books in Spanish to her little brother.

THE GIVEAWAY

We’re giving away a copy of My Colors, My World/Mis colores, mi mundo. To enter this giveaway, please share with us the name of your favorite bilingual or Spanish board book.

This giveaway ends at midnight EST on Tuesday, May 31, 2011. Entries/Comments that do not follow the submission guidelines will be invalid and automatically deleted. Sorry, just need to keep it fair. Good luck to all!

Check out the Giveaway Rules.

Disclosure: Scholastic provided me with a copy of the book to review. All opinions are my own.

So I did, and so far, they do.  We have books on our shelves, on the floor, on the couch, in our beds.  So when I received a Scholastic “Storybook Treasures” DVD set, (My First Collection Featuring Splat the Cat), I was quite curious, and I must admit that my main question was, this looks nice, but why watch the DVD when you can read the book?  (And my feelings about “screen time” really have nothing to do with it–some days we watch several hours of TV around here, other times we go a week or two without watching at all).

Here’s the thing about reading, though, that I didn’t realize when my children were infants and I was purchasing books left and right.  Reading, in our household, has taken many forms in the past five-and-a-half years.  When my boys were babies, I had a captive audience, as I would read to them when they were in their cribs.  As they’ve grown, we’ve gone through phases when we’ve read for at least an hour before bedtime.  Other times my boys are too busy playing with their trains or engaging in whatever their current favorite activity is, and I don’t force the issue.  Right now they get stories at bedtime, but they’re not read by me.  My advanced reader wants to read them all by himself.  My emerging reader does, too, and I listen as he points at the text in a story and more or less invents his own story based on the book.

We watched the DVDs over a few days, starting with “The Napping House,” one of our favorite stories ever.  The words to the story were lit up at the bottom of the screen (an option you can turn on or off), and we listened to the story being narrated with pleasant music in the background (in most instances, I found the narration and the background music to be just right).  “The Napping House” had no animation, just close-ups of the beautiful artwork from the story at the appropriate times.  Other stories were animated (though the animation was usually low-key).  I found I preferred the older stories with no animation, but my children didn’t seem to care.

There is a good combination of old and new stories in the set.  It was nice to see the familiar ones included, and my boys were intrigued by the new ones (my own favorite was “Duck on a Bike,” by David Shannon).  They were more taken by the stories than I expected.  When we watched made a difference, though–I played one DVD one afternoon while I puttered around and they were easily distracted by all the other things there were to do on a beautiful Friday afternoon.  But then we spent one evening curled up on the couch as we watched some of the stories together, and I’d argue that that’s just how they were meant to be watched–together.  My  boys were full of spontaneous remarks–¡Pajaritos!  ¡Mira, mariposas!  ¡Un señor tocando un tambor!–much like they are when we read together.

One of the bonus features is a Spanish-language version of “The Story of Ping,” which I was really excited about watching.  I thought both the narration and the translation of the story were lovely, though I was disappointed that captioning was not an option when playing the version in Spanish.  Also, watching it only made me want more–if there were an entire set of stories available in Spanish, I’d snap it up in a heartbeat.

I do like that you can watch the whole DVD, or just one or two stories at a time (each story is about ten minutes long), to suit any attention span.  The series is aimed at children aged 2 to 6, and at five-and-a-half, I agree that my boys will outgrow it soon–the perfect age group might be more like 2 to 5.

While this DVD set will never be a substitute for reading stories together, I could easily see a place for it in our household as a nice complement to our traditional bedtime stories, despite my initial skepticism.  The music and narration are so soothing, just right for bedtime, the stories are a nice antidote to some of the shows we usually watch, and I can see us re-watching these upstairs, under the covers, while I sit back with a cup of tea. 

THE GIVEAWAY!

One winner will receive a Scholastic Storybook Treasures: My First Collection, Featuring Splat the Cat.

To enter just leave a comment telling us which of the 14 stories in the collection are you most excited about watching. You can go here to check out the full list.

That’s all you have to do to enter this giveaway. If you want to up your chances at winning, then this is how you can get additional entries (only after you’ve completed the step above):

**Please leave a separate comment for each so we can count them and avoid mistakes.

1. Subscribe to receive blog updates and subscriber-only content via email and leave us an extra comment letting us know you did so or that you’re already a subscriber. Make sure to leave the comment using the same email you subscribed with.

2. Follow us on Twitter and tweet about this giveaway including a link to the post and @SpanglishBaby. Copy the link to the tweet in an additional comment on the giveaway’s post.

3. Like SpanglishBaby on Facebook and join a thriving community of parents.

This giveaway ends Sunday, May 22nd at midnight EST and is open to everyone over 18 years of age.  Check out the Giveaway Rules.

Disclosure: We received a copy for review purposes. All opinions are our own.

I was recently invited to become one of  Scholastic’s Mom Blog Friends which means that every month,  I get to review one or two books from their Book Club catalogs. I immediately jumped at the opportunity because I wholeheartedly support Scholastic’s mission. For obvious reasons, I’ll be reviewing books from Club Leo.

By the way, if you are not familiar with Club Leo, you’re missing out on a great option to grow your niños bilingual and Spanish home library. This Scholastic Book Club has a diverse selection of books for kids in preK through 6th grade which can be great additions to any bilingual household.

* * * * * * *

I guess I must live under a rock. I had no idea Shakira had written a Dora book entitled La aventura del Día Mundial de la Escuela until I saw it on Club Leo’s Spring catalog.

As soon as I did, I knew I wanted to have it. I’ve loved Shakira ever since I first listened to her music back when I was in college — many moons ago — and way before she became a crossover sensation. I was really eager to see how her talent for writing music translated to writing children’s books.

I might be mistaken, but it seems as if Shakira wrote the book in English, which I find kind of strange, since not only is it not her first language, but it’s one that she recently learned. Either way, the translation is well done and, you probably know this by now, that’s a big plus in my book.

The story follows the path that all Dora’s adventures usually do: there’s some kind of problem and Dora and Boots find a way to come to the rescue. In this case, Dora is celebrating World School Day at her school with the help of Shakira. However, the other schools around the world which will be celebrating with them, are lacking all kinds of materials to start the new school year. So, Dora and Boots come to the rescue as each school decides to share some of their materials with the school which needs it most.

My daughter is about to finish preK and will be entering Kindergarten in the fall. We’ve been talking about schools a lot lately and she has a lot of questions about how things work there and what her days will be like. I think she’s excited, but a bit apprehensive about going somewhere new, where she doesn’t know anybody.

While the book’s main lesson is to teach children about the importance of sharing — something which little ones have such a hard time doing — I enjoyed reading Shakira’s book to my daughter because it features different types of schools around the world. The story includes a tree school in Ethiopia, a school in a bus in India, and a boat school in Cambodia. Vanessa was really intrigued by all this and even after we were done reading the book, she wanted to know more.

The story also gave us an opportunity to talk a bit about our world map and where each of these countries is located. I only wished Shakira had included at least one country in Latin America. I think that would’ve made the book complete. I wonder why she didn’t?

But the best thing about the book for me is that part of the proceeds from the sale of this book will go to Shakira’s renowned Pies Descalzos Foundation dedicated to childhood education.

THE GIVEAWAY

We’re giving away a copy of La aventura del Día Mundial de la Escuela by Shakira. To enter this giveaway, please take a look at Club Leo’s Spring catalog and leave a message letting me know which book you’d like me to review next and why.

This giveaway ends at midnight EST on Sunday, May 15, 2011. Entries/Comments that do not follow the submission guidelines will be invalid and automatically deleted. Sorry, just need to keep it fair. Good luck to all!

Check out the Giveaway Rules.

Disclosure: Scholastic provided me with a copy of the book to review. All opinions are my own.