The deadline for this contest has been extended until May 15th! Encourage schools to enter! My Bilingual School Library Contest is the idea of Ana Flores and Roxana Soto at SpanglishBaby. This is a fabulous contest! Please keep reading and then spread the word. This contest will award a school library $500 worth of bilingual [...]
Earth Day, El día de la Tierra, is April 22, and children will be hearing and thinking about how to care for the planet. When you do activities related to El día de la Tierra in Spanish, their awareness of the topic in English will help them understand and learn the same concepts in Spanish. [...]
Mamá pájaro (Mama Bird) is a free printable mini-book, and it is excellent for speaking Spanish with your child. The book is short, with basic Spanish words and simple, common Spanish structures. The story lends itself well to follow-up activities, so it is easy to reinforce what your child is learning. This mini-book tells the [...]
This weekend you may have celebrated Children’s Book Day. If you work with Spanish language learners, you may also want to recognize World Book Day, or El Día Internacional del Libro later in the month. This is a wonderful way to celebrate part of Spanish history and culture. UNESCO designated April 23 as a day [...]
Picture books in Spanish are one of the best language learning tools you can use with children. Even as kids get older, if you can convince them to listen or to read together, they will learn an amazing amount of Spanish. I love the Spanish-English bilingual book Un gato y un perro/A Cat and a [...]
This is a free book of fun and practical activities for teaching Spanish to children. ¡Aprendo jugando! Actividades de Español para niños y niñas de 6 a 9 años (I Learn by Playing! Spanish Activities for Boys and Girls from 6 to 9) is available to download in PDF format so that you can make [...]
Stories without words are useful tools for teaching Spanish to children. These wordless picture books engage children actively with the events on the page. Children interpret the drawings and follow the narrative by identifying characters, emotions, actions, and consequences. Simple phrases and questions in Spanish make the most of this connection and of the context [...]
¿Algo más? (Anything else?). Such a common, useful question! When I am choosing picture books to read with beginning Spanish learners, I am always happy to find a repeated phrase that we use commonly in conversation. ¿Algo más? is that phrase in the book Siesta, by Ginger Foglesong Guy. Siesta is a bilingual book with [...]
Douglas Wright is a well-known poet, illustrator, and humorist from Argentina. In addition to being the author of many books, his work appears in magazines and newspapers in Argentina and other countries. He is extremely generous with his work, making much of it available on the site La biblio de los chicos, and also as [...]
Children can draw on information they already know to understand new Spanish vocabulary and structures. When teachers and parents talk about familiar subjects in Spanish, children associate concepts they understand with the new language. This way, children learn Spanish vocabulary in context and applied to content, rather than as lists of vocabulary words which are [...]
Using Spanish to talk about information that your child already knows is an effective way of exposing her to the language. If a child is familiar with certain information, she can draw on what she knows to understand Spanish. This is one way of providing comprehensible input, and comprehensible input is essential to language acquisition. [...]
One of the biggest challenges for Spanish teachers and parents teaching Spanish to their children is providing sufficient input at the appropriate level. Exposing a child to Spanish is not difficult, but exposing a child to Spanish at the right level and in a way that promotes learning is time consuming and a lot of [...]
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