tips

I was with my children in a store last month looking at Halloween costumes.  As usual, our conversation was completely in Spanish. I noticed a mother observing our interactions, and when I smiled at her, she shared her own bilingual adventures with me. Having been born and raised in Mexico, she initially only spoke Spanish to her son. Unfortunately, when he started school, he rebelled against Spanish and refused to speak it. Sadly, this mother gave up and switched toRead More ...

A while back I wrote about my daughter Vanessa having a hard time pronouncing the letter R. She’s gotten better at it, but now it’s her 4-year-old brother’s turn to learn how to roll his R’s and she’s doing a great job teaching him. He still has ways to go, but as with my daughter, I’m not really worried about it because typically Spanish speaking children don’t learn to do it until they’re between 5 and 7 years old. IRead More ...

  Editor’s note: Last week, we brought you a guest post outlining the pros and cons of online tutoring for bilingual kids. Today, we have a follow up by the same author with tips on how to actually find a Spanish tutor online. The way we started our search was just by Goggling “Spanish tutor online” (or “Spanish tutor via Skype”). A lot of schools popped up, many of them were based in Guatemala and Ecuador. We have changed three schools andRead More ...

Before having children, I fantasized how easy it would be to raise them speaking Spanish, English and even Mandarin. Although I am not a native speaker, I was confident that my Spanish skills, sheer determination, and obviously my Spanish-speaking husband would propel our household into bilingual bliss. We began by speaking to our children in (mostly) Spanish, but with both my husband and I working full-time while taking grad classes, their exposure to Spanish was limited. When we adopted myRead More ...

This September Enzo started in the pre-nursery school classroom. I was very excited when I got the supply list and I saw that Enzo would be having “homework” — until I got the first worksheets and I sat down to do them with him. The worksheet had a big picture of an apple: A is for Apple. Well… hhhmmmm. OK. So I went ahead and did the worksheets the best way I knew how, I just translated the sheets asRead More ...