Editor’s note: To go along with our SpanglishBaby Live Google+ Hangout about immersion travel, we’ve prepared a whole week of posts about this topic. Our first one is by Susan, one of our regular contributors, whom we would’ve loved to have as a guest on the Hangout, but who’s unable to join us because of her job as a Spanish teacher. Susan, her husband and her two trilingual kids will go on their third immersion trip — their second to Peru — this summer and she has tons of info to share.

Visiting and traveling in Spanish speaking countries is an educational and fun way to enrich your child’s language abilities. While traveling with children can be challenging, the rewards are well worth the effort of planning such a trip. A journey abroad exposes your child to another country and culture, improves their Spanish skills, and is a great way for the entire family to bond and learn together.

Schools and Homestays

I have always been an independent traveler, and like to set up our Spanish classes, homestays, and excursions by doing my own independent research on the Internet. Once my husband and I have decided on a destination, I do a Google search of Spanish schools in the area. I read through the websites of many different schools to see what classes and programs they offer, and then visit different travel forums to read the reviews of former students. Once I have narrowed down the selection, I email the directors to see if they will be able to accommodate our special situation — a bilingual family with young children. This process does take some time, but the research and planning of our trip is a lot of fun.

It seems that traveling with children is becoming more popular. Most schools have a teacher that works with children, but it is always important to emphasize that your children are bilingual to avoid the teaching of the basics such as colors and numbers. I always request that the kids are read to extensively and immersed in children’s literature since educational research emphasizes that reading expands a child’s vocabulary and improves their language skills. I bring some books and always buy a supply of Spanish books to take back home.

A homestay experience can be a wonderful way to get to know the culture of the country that you are visiting, but it is important to be with a good family. I have always used homestays that have been arranged by the school. In an earlier post, I described our experiences at wonderful homestay and a horrible homestay. Last year’s experience was so bad, my husband was reluctant to do another homestay this year. To avoid an awful situation, I have stipulated beforehand that we can change houses or even go to a hotel instead of staying in a homestay where we are miserable. I am confident that things will go well, and that we will once again have the experience of getting to know a local family.

Medical and Security Concerns

My husband and I traveled a lot and even lived and worked abroad before having children. I didn’t worry too much about health issues or security concerns. That all changed when we had children. Unfortunately, I learned the importance of researching health issues the hard way.

Two years ago my husband and I had decided to take the children to Peru, a country we had visited as a couple several years earlier. I had the airline tickets purchased and plans made. When discussing with the doctor which immunizations we would need for the trip, he expressed serious concern at taking our children to Cusco where the altitude is around 11,200 feet. Since we live at sea level, there was real concern of altitude sickness. Since our children were only 3 and 1½ years old at the time, the doctor advised us to change our plans and visit cities at a lower elevation. We still traveled to Peru, but I had to change our plane tickets, reservations and plans, and we faced financial penalties for changing the flights. Now I look into the medical recommendations months before making my travel plans.

The CDC’s travel website is an excellent source of information on health and immunization recommendations and requirements. If you are unable to see a doctor who specializes in travel medicine, it is a good idea to print out the information and take it to the appointment so that your pediatrician can use it as a guide.

I also find it prudent to check the State Department’s Travel Website. I always like to read the country specific information and to check if any travel alerts or warnings are in place. While I won’t necessarily change my plans based on what I read, it is a good idea to be informed. For our trip this summer, I have found the Facebook page for the U.S. Embassy in Lima to be informative. There are also recommendation for places to visit and fun activities in the country.

Traveling with Children

When we first traveled to Peru, my youngest was still in diapers. While most big cities do carry the same products that can be found in the United States, smaller cities and towns don’t necessarily have these same products. We visited some remote villages and even hiked to the bottom of the Colca Canyon. Diapers would have been impossible to find, so I was glad that we had carried them with us.

I do not recommend taking a stroller. They may be useful in big cities, but for the most part, the roads and sidewalks are not conducive to rolling around your child. I prefer carrying my kids in a child carrier backpack. Peruvian mothers carry their children on their backs using beautiful decorative cloths. They loved talking to me about my carrier and just being a mom. I really became aware of how much we as mothers have in common in spite of our cultural differences.

Most importantly I think it is important to prepare your child for the trip to a new country. I get books out of the library and we discuss where we will travel and the sites that we will see. Children’s books and YouTube videos can help give a deeper understanding of the country and culture before traveling. Having some prior knowledge of the country will enhance their learning and experience during your travels.

A lot planning goes into putting a travel immersion experience together for your child. The language learning, the cultural understanding, and the knowledge of another country provides an invaluable learning experience that will always be remembered.

{Photo courtesy of Susan Stephan}

Yesterday was the first day of the 2012 “Education Nation” National Summit, taking place from Sept. 23-25 in New York City. The three-day event – which draws more than 300 of the country’s thought leaders in education, government, business, philanthropy and media, is focusing on successful examples of innovation in education, including bilingual education.

Summit sessions, moderated by top NBC News journalists, and NBC’s on-air programming will highlight a series of case studies from communities across the country, providing tools and takeaways for participants and viewers. One of those case studies, is Geddes Elementary in Baldwin Park, California and their dual-language immersion program.

Check out the video below to see how fascinating these programs are and how they truly serve as a model to improve fledgling school systems. Then, visit EducationNation.com for more detailed information and in-depth interviews with Geddes Elementary parents and staff.

The Summit is being live-streamed on EducationNation.com (check out full schedule here), and I suggest you put an alert to watch the panel discussion on child development, literacy, dual language, and minority students on Tuesday, Sept. 25 at 8:55 a.m. EST. Panelists include Richard J. Noriega, President and CEO, AVANCE; Virginia Castro, principal, Geddes Elementary School; and Patricia Kuhl, Professor of Speech & Hearing Sciences, University of Washington.

{Photo credit: EducationNation.com}

I was one of those very lucky kids who attended a dual language immersion school. Although I moved around a lot as a child — living in 5 countries in 3 continents by the time I was 14 — I spent five solid years at my mother’s alma mater back in Peru and I was instructed mostly in English from 4th to 8th grade.

As far as I remember, I only had a handful of courses, including Historia and Geografía del Perú, in Spanish. The rest of my school days were spent immersed in English in a Spanish-speaking country. By the time I entered 5th grade, my private school required all its students to take up a third language. I chose French, but I could’ve chosen Italian or German just as easily.

So, I thought it very strange when I moved to the States and found out that, although offered, I didn’t really have to take a “foreign language,” until I got to high school. And then, I only needed two years of this foreign language in order to graduate. In reality, since I already spoke a foreign language — as in my native Spanish — I could’ve very well taken a test and I could’ve been exempted from this requirement.

But because I’d been taking French since 5th grade — albeit only a couple of times a week — I signed up for it as one of my electives when I entered my neighborhood’s junior high school in Miami, and I continued taking it until my junior year in high school. I eventually picked it up again as a sophomore at the University of Florida (in fact, you can almost say college French is the reason why Ana and I are friends today). Since then, I’ve taken courses at the Alliance Française on and off for the last 15 years.

All this to prove that I’m obviously a huge lover of languages and to confess that if I had the money, I would spend the rest of my life traveling and learning other languages. And so, it pains me to no end to read articles like the one from Forbes Ana sent me earlier this morning. Titled “America’s Foreign Language Deficit,” and written by two prominent Cornell University professors, the article exposes the sad state of affairs this nation is facing in terms of teaching its students foreign languages.

While I love to think that more and more people are embracing bilingualism in this country, the reality when it comes to foreign language offerings available to our students is pretty bleak. Check out some of these discouraging figures from the Forbes article :

• The percentage of public and private elementary schools offering foreign language instruction decreased from 31 to 25 percent from 1997 to 2008.
• Instruction in public elementary schools dropped from 24 percent to 15 percent, with rural districts hit the hardest.
• The percentage of all middle schools offering foreign language instruction decreased from 75 to 58 percent.
• About 25 percent of elementary schools and 30 percent of middle schools report a shortage of qualified foreign language teachers.
• In 2009-2010, only 50.7 percent of higher education institutions required foreign language study for a baccalaureate, down from 67.5 percent in 1994-1995. And many colleges and universities have reduced or eliminated instructional offerings in “less popular” languages.

Speaking more than one language is an invaluable gift, but in a highly connected world like the one we live in today, it’s become more of an indispensable skill.

As fierce proponents and supporters of bilingualism, Ana and I want to make sure that our voices — and that of all the other parents who believe bilingual is better — are heard loud and clear by anyone and everyone who has a say in changing the discouraging numbers above. We’re in the process of trying to figure out how to do that, and we promise to let you know when we do. In the meantime, I leave you with this call to action by the authors of the Forbes’ article:

We ask parents to urge their children to attain proficiency in a foreign language, whether or not schools require them to do so; PTAs to lobby school boards; faculty members and deans in colleges and universities to re-visit foreign language requirements; readers of Forbes to write to their elected representatives.

{Photo via Fiona Bradley}

UPDATE: Due to the great response we’ve received, we’ve decided to extend the deadline to enter this contest by one week. Please click on the graphic above for updated information. Thanks for your support!

For more than a year now both Ana and I have been trying to come up with a way in which SpanglishBaby could give back to the bilingual community we so wholeheartedly support. We always knew we wanted to make sure we incorporated bilingual literacy in the project we ended up choosing. Today, as we’re getting ready to celebrate the 15th anniversary of El Día de los niños/El Día de los libros at the end of the month, it thrills us to no end to be able to announce what we finally came up with: My Bilingual School Library Contest.

While our children are not yet school-aged, we’re aware of the huge need dual language elementary schools, schools with ELL programs and those that teach Spanish to their students at the elementary level have in terms of reading material in Spanish (or bilingual). We’ve heard from many teachers in these schools that they have such small budgets that they end up bringing their own bilingual or Spanish books to share with their students. We believe so strongly in the importance of literacy when raising bilingual children that we decided to help change this by stocking one bilingual school’s library with as many books as we could get.

To that end, we’ve joined forces with some of the major bilingual/Spanish publishing houses we’ve been working with in the last two years and they’ve graciously agreed to donate a total of $500 worth of books to ONE very lucky bilingual school library.

To enter this contest, we’re asking each school to have either their second or third graders come up with a poster celebrating Día. Once it’s completed, we’d like it to be emailed to us together with a short paragraph explaining why their school should win this contest and what winning would mean to them.

We will be accepting entries for My Bilingual School Library Contest from today until May 8th, 2011 May 15th, 2011. Then, we’ll upload all the submissions that follow the guidelines and we’ll open up the voting process so that people can vote for their favorite entry once a day for five days. Once we close the voting period, we’ll tabulate the votes to find out which school will be winning $500 worth of bilingual and Spanish books for its library.

If your children go to a dual language school, you are a teacher at one, or you know a school that would benefit from My Bilingual School Library Contest, we urge you to encourage them to enter. Our hope is that this book contest will give Spanish teachers an opportunity to foment their students’ love for reading in Spanish by providing them with a variety of books to choose from.

We’d like to thank the following publishing houses for believing in us and in this worthy project. Without their support, My Bilingual School Library Contest would not be possible. ¡Muchísimas gracias!

Children’s Book Press

Arte Público Press

Cinco Puntos Press

Bilingual Readers

Lectorum

Lorito Books

Groundwood Books

BrickHouse Education

Candlewick Press

and

Cheerios Spoonful of Stories

For all the rules and regulations for My Bilingual School Library Contest, please go here or click the banner above.

Photo credit: abbynormy

Who gets to be trilingual? The situation always seems to present itself as such: one parent speaks one minority language and the other parent another minority language and they live somewhere, where the majority language is spoken.

What about those parents who are monolingual? What about parents who are both what they call heritage speakers of a minority language, like myself? What about parents who would LOVE for their children to speak more than one language, but can’t afford to send them to private foreign language schools? This is one of the very reasons why I don’t play an instrument, for example. My parents did not have the financial means to send me to lessons, let alone rent or buy an instrument. I got to dance ballet, but only because the classes were by donation.

I feel fortunate that we have the option to send our daughter to a foreign language school. Although as much as I advocate for multilingualism I also have to acknowledge that there are individuals for whom this is not an option.

The city I live in, Austin, Texas, has finally implemented dual language education in our public schools. A selected few schools were chosen, but hopefully others will follow. This kind of education, where bilingualism is the goal, has been one our local community has advocated for several years. I guess you can say the larger community is starting to find value in multilingualism or that all it can sometimes take is a savvy, younger, open-minded superintendent to catch on to the idea of bilingualism as a goal. So, again, I pose the question, what about those cities where dual language education is not an option in the public schools? It was only a few years ago where this was the case in my progressive, university-town of a city. The only schools that existed were fairly expensive private ones.

There’s more to consider besides a parents motivation, such as, what are the costs to become bilingual or trilingual? As I have been researching private day cares for our baby I have learned that private-language schools cost a little more than your regular private schools. In fact, these private language schools are in such demand that I find myself weighing the “costs”, and not just in monetary terms, but in other ways, such as teachers that seem more like niñeras than actual teachers.

When thinking about how much it costs to becoming multilingual I am referring to multiple sentidos. There’s the extra financial burden and then there’s the fact that the foreign languages schools are limited in scope, therefore limited in how particular parents can be when thinking about other factors such as teaching philosophy, cleanliness, distance from home, or student to teacher ratios.

No matter where we stand in our plight for multilingual education one thing remains the same: the importance of continuing to advocate for dual language education so that everyone has the option and not have to weigh out the costs.

Photo credit: Najib Joe Hakim

As soon as we finished watching Speaking in Tongues, an inspiring documentary film which follows the journey of four children as they become bilingual while immersed in dual language programs, my husband turned to me and declared: “We have to do the same for Vanessa.”

The award-winning film, produced and directed by the husband-and-wife team of Marcia Jarmel and Ken Schneider, showcases the stories of four kids—and their families—from completely different backgrounds as they struggle and triumph at becoming bilingual and bi-cultural for all kinds of different reasons. It’s all about language immersion education—and you know how we feel about that—told through the extraordinary stories of these four children. The film is engaging and eye-opening. If there ever were any doubts regarding the benefits of bilingualism, Speaking in Tongues, should do away with them.

“Bilingual education is so contentious, it’s often seen as kind of a coated discussion of other things, like our changing demographics and our immigration policy,” said Jarmel who founded Patchwork Films with her husband back in 1994 with the idea to delve into current social issues via character-driven stories. “But if you re-frame it into thinking that being bilingual in any other language is an asset, then what do we look like? Kids who grow up bilingual understand from the get-go that there’s more than one perspective in the world and what would America look like if our citizens understood that our way is just one way?”

The film opens up with several examples taken from YouTube regarding the absurd English-only agenda that many continue to push for and which has sadly become part of the legislation in more than 30 states in this country. Community activist and long-time, ardent supporter of multilingual education, Dr. Ling-chi Wang, talks about how there is no other country that even with such linguistic diversity continues to be monolingual.

“We’re so stuck on this idea that English is our language and that we only need to learn English because the rest of the world is learning English,” explained Jarmel who is not bilingual, but so firmly believes in the power of bilingualism that her two children have been attending dual language public schools in San Francisco since they were in Kindergarten. “Of course we need to learn English. It’s not a matter of kids learning English or not. I think the biggest misconception, which is also the thing that is most counter-intuitive, is that kids will learn English better if they’re learning in two languages.”

It’s a well-known fact that children who speak a minority language when they enter school in the U.S. for the first time—be it Spanish, Chinese or Italian—will become proficient in English quicker and more successfully, if they continue to be taught in their mother tongue. In other words, the idea of trying to “erase” their first language by immersing them in an English-only curriculum in an effort to help them learn this country’s majority language is not only counter-productive, but it’s also a way of undermining the prestige and importance of speaking a minority language.

“One of the things I love about the immersion schools is that the kids who are native speakers of the language that’s being taught they, instead of been seen as them having some kind of deficit, they actually have an asset,” Jarmel expressed.

Photo credit: Najib Joe Hakim

One of the greatest aspects of the film is that the four children it follows come from completely different backgrounds (there’s a Caucasian eighth-grader, an Asian-American sixth-grader, a Latino fifth-grader and an African-American kindergartner) and are learning a second language (Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish) for a variety of reasons including: heritage, future career opportunities, communication with family elders.

There are several poignant moments in the film, but I won’t ruin it by telling you about them, so you’ll just have to see for yourselves. I will; however, share with you that my heart broke when I heard some of the Asian-American family members, of the one girl portrayed in the film, talking about not been able to have a relationship with their grandmother because they can’t speak Chinese and she doesn’t speak English. As I’ve mentioned in the past, nothing would hurt me more than my children not been able to communicate with their non-English speaking relatives in Peru and Puerto Rico. To me, raising them bilingual is more than just giving them a professional edge, it’s about familia and heritage.

“It’s a very powerful model,” said Jarmel. “Our desire is that there will be more of a national conversation about the value of bilingualism, which is both about creating opportunities for kids to learn a second language and for valuing the languages that kids bring into the schools because we need all of that.”

Speaking in Tongues is scheduled to air on PBS stations around the country in August, in the meantime, Jarmel is also looking to get in touch with local organizations/groups of people which advocate multilingual education to arrange community screenings. As all of you are SpanglishBaby readers because you believe in the importance of bilingualism, I strongly suggest you get in touch with her to make this happen in your communities and get the conversation on this extremely important issue rolling.

Although you have to wait until the Fall to view the film on PBS, you can purchase the DVD here or your can enter to win your very own copy, which Jarmel is graciously giving away to one lucky SpanglishBaby reader, by reading below.

The Giveaway

This giveaway is now closed. Congratulations to our winner #8 Jana!

For your chance to win a copy of Speaking in Tongues, please watch the trailer by going here, and come back to tell us why you think you’d like to watch the film.

Giveaway rules.

This giveaway ends at midnight EST on Sunday, April 25, 2010. 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!

Disclosure: A sample DVD was provided for review purposes; all opinions are 100% ours. Check out our full Disclosure + Privacy Policy.