Recently, I was invited to be the mistress of ceremonies for an event that kicked off Bilingual Literacy Month in my area. Spearheaded by ReadConmigo the award-winning parent-focused bilingual literacy program, the month-long event is giving away 50,000 free bilingual books and is hosting a 31-Day Bilingual Book Reading Challenge. Read Conmigo encourages parents to play an active role in their children’s development. As many of you smart parents know, research keeps proving that such involvement at an early age is essential to a child’s long-term academic and personal success.
Reading in English and in Spanish plays a big part of that future success. Betsy Basom a Spanish teacher in Southern California said, “An important phase of learning a language is listening to others speak the language. Some children go through what is called the “silent phase” in which they are absorbing, yet not producing the sounds they hear. The person who reads to the child is modeling the sounds for words and introducing new vocabulary.”
The more we read to our children and the sooner we start, the more words they learn. So, when it is a good time to start reading to our children? Personally, I started to “read”(picture books mainly) to my children since they were about 8 months old. We would sit down on the floor with big picture books of animals and numbers and we go over the pages and look at the pictures and say the words out loud. I would say the words in Spanish and my husband in English. There weren’t many bilingual books around then.
Laura Garcia co-founder of the blog Mamás por el mundo ,
has two children ages 4 years and 12 months. She and her husband started reading to her oldest child before his first birthday and is now doing the same with the baby. “We started reading to both children since they were between eleven and twelve months and that has really worked well. Reading time is our favorite time of the day. We are relaxed, everyone has eaten, taken a bath and we look forward the the quietness and the quality of that particular time with no distractions, just the 4 of us, enjoying a book!”
Today, there are more bilingual books available than when my children were younger so it is a lot easier to commit to reading to children in both languages.
