SPANGLISH LIVING POSTS
Bugs, Dirt, and Kids
For Christmas, my mom's gift was the book Lasagna Gardening, along with several promised deliveries of manure and mulch. Yes, I know-- my nature and garden-loving mother is amazing. This week was another delivery of mulch, and we all got outside to work on getting our...
Being Brave With Language
I have a terrible habit I've had to work against my whole life: I compare. Constantly. It's a battle to remind myself not to do this. I do it with everything: how much I get done, how clean my house is, how our children behave. And it spills over into Spanish: how...
What I Love About Raising Bilingual Kids
Why Your Bilingual Child Needs Poetry
Inside: Why poetry is beneficial to bilingual kids. When my son was two, it became obvious his English was more advanced than his Spanish. This wasn't shocking (we live in the U.S.), but I wanted to figure out how to maximize our minority language. I began to watch...
The Benefits of Being Bi-Cultural
Being a bi-cultural family can have its fair share of challenges. Think disagreements in parenting (should the baby wear socks in the summer?) and traditions (how big does this 1st birthday part need to be?). It might mean never feeling home, or always missing the...
Little Ones and Language: When Two Cultures Meet
My two-year-old's voice comes from the backseat: "Mommy, love you MÁS." I peer into the rearview mirror and smile at him. "No, love YOU más." "No! Love YOU más!" This is what the experts refer to as code-switching: mixing language, Spanglish, in our case. I try to...
Nature in the Early Years
"It would be well if we all persons in authority, parents and all who act for parents, could make up our minds that there is no sort of knowledge to be got in these early years so valuable to children as that which they get for themselves of the world they live in....
The Rewards of Raising Bilingual Toddlers
For a long time, speaking to my baby son in Spanish felt odd. Talking to a baby is basically a monologue, except for a few coos and gurgles here and there. I knew that my son was soaking in every little word, and that all our little rhymes and descriptions and...
Bilingual Baby Signing
Inside: Bilingual babies sing language. We have been using baby sign language with our first son, since he was about ten months old. I meant to start earlier, and teach more signs than I did, but even the 5 or 6 signs we've mastered have been incredibly...
Why Bilingual Families Need Books
When I was pregnant with our first, I would confidently pat my expanding belly and share with friends our plans to speak Spanish at home. We were right to make this plan: our little ones simply wouldn't get enough Spanish time only speaking with Papá, a native...
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