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Just wanted to share with you the winners of 2010’s Pura Belpré Award. Established back in 1996, the award goes to “a Latino/Latina writer and illustrator whose work best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience in an outstanding work of literature for children and youth.”
Author Award winner:
- Return to Sender by Julia Alvarez – A YA (young adults) novel about the friendship between two children from different backgrounds, one an American citizen, the other one an undocumented immigrant whose lives come together due to necessity. I’ve enjoyed reading several of Alvarez’s adult novels and although this is one Vanessa is way too young for, I’ll definitely be checking it out myself!
Illustrator Award winner:
- Book Fiesta!: Celebrate Children’s Day/Book Day by Pat Mora, illustrated by Rafael López – We’re so happy to hear two books by one of our favorite bilingual book’s author, Mora, won this award for their illustrations. In case you don’t know her or her books, you can find a review of Book Fiesta and an interview with Mora here.
Author Honor books:
- Diego: Bigger Than Life by Carmen T. Bernier-Grand, illustrated by David Diaz.
- Federico García Lorca by Georgina Lázaro, illustrated by Enrique S. Moreiro – This book is part of an awesome series by Lectorum called Cuando los Grandes eran Pequeños. Be on the lookout for a ReadMe post reviewing this series in the not too distant future.
Illustrator Honor books:
- Diego: Bigger Than Life by Carmen T. Bernier-Grand, illustrated by David Diaz.
- My Abuelita by Tony Johnston, illustrated by Yuyi Morales.
- Gracias/Thanks by Pat Mora, illustrated by John Parra – Another one of Pat Mora’s books. We wrote about it here. Perfect to teach children how and why to be thankful.
Congratulations to all the winners!
This week’s Ask an Expert question was sent in by Leticia and I am so happy she did because I just recently started wondering the same thing. Vanessa is totally into the alphabet and wanting to know “¿qué dice aquí?” all the time.
“I would like to teach my kids to read in Spanish. Any suggestions on materials to use? Thanks.”
Hi Leticia! I love your name! Leticia is one of my favorite cities in Colombia – it’s in the Amazon region and it’s a very beautiful place!
With regard to your question, there are tons of great sites online that can help kids read in Spanish. Here is a collection of some of my favorites. You can also check out my Delicious bookmarks (http://www.delicious.com/miscositas) and my website for updated links that seem to pop up every day! ¡Buena suerte!
America Reads Spanish: this is a great place to start looking for reading materials. On this site you can download a book called: Essential Guide to Spanish Reading for Children and Young Adults, which is an annotated bibliographic list of great reading in Spanish sorted by age level and recommended by librarians and educators from around the country! http://www.americareadsspanish.org/
World Digital Library: this site makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world; materials are available in Spanish and several other languages. http://www.wdl.org/en/#
International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL): A digital library of outstanding children’s books from all over the world; read full texts with accompanying images; search archive by country to find books in Spanish – and many other languages. http://en.childrenslibrary.org/
StoryPlace: A digital online library for kids with stories, games and activities; kids can read along with the story as the audio portion plays. http://www.storyplace.org/sp/
BookBox: A neat site with interesting stories in different languages, with subtitles or without them; you can access a sample of the story for free, but the full story is $2.99 to download and keep; free games and other materials as well; materials available in English, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Hindi and 21 other languages. http://www.bookbox.com/
MisCositas: My site! I have over 20 “virtual picturebooks” that students can read, with challenging vocabulary words linked to a pop-up picture dictionary; after reading the “book,” kids can view the accompanying video on our YouTube channel. http://www.miscositas.com
Lori Langer de Ramirez – Bilingual educator who began her career as a teacher of Spanish, French and ESL. She holds a Master’s Degree in Applied Linguistics and a Doctorate in Curriculum and Teaching from Teachers College, Columbia University. She is currently the Chairperson of the ESL and World Language Department for Herricks Public Schools, New York. Lori is the author of Take Action: Lesson Plans for the Multicultural Classroom and Voices of Diversity: Stories, Activities and Resources for the Multicultural Classroom, as well as several Spanish-language books and texts (Cuéntame – Folklore y Fábulas and Mi abuela ya no está). Her interactive website (miscositas.com) offers teachers over 40 virtual picture books and other curricular materials for teaching Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, Italian, Spanish and Thai. Her areas of research and curriculum development are multicultural and diversity education, folktales in the language classroom and technology in language teaching. You can read her answers here.
Photo by bimurch
As I was rummaging through some baby toys and books getting them ready for Santiago, who just turned five months and is so much more interested in all kinds of things, I came across a CD of lullabies that I received as a gift from one of my mother’s sisters in Mexico. I immediately remembered how lucky my kids are to have family in South Latin America that can help them appreciate their culture even more through amazing examples.
The CD is called Arriba del Cielo by Susana Harp. I’m really not sure why it was in the box of baby books, although I guess my daughter stopped listening to lullabies a while back. Anyhow, I immediately decided to play it, and a bunch of memories came rushing back.
I used to play it for Vanessa when she was a baby. That feels like a long time ago, and she is only three and a half years old. Although we didn’t understand the majority of the lyrics – Harp sings in several of Mexico’s indigenous tongues: Zapoteco, Maya, Mixteco and Náhualt – her beautiful voice is definitely soothing. Half of the songs are in Spanish and you can find translations of the lyrics, for the ones that are not, in the CD booklet. Vanessa very quickly realized it wasn’t all in Spanish and wanted to know what language it was and why. One awesome opportunity to talk about languages and diversity!
Harp describes her CD, which she dedicated to her son Emiliano, as “arrullos, rondas, juegos, nanas…cantos de niños, murmullos del alma.” ¿Qué lindo, no?
The other day, I played the track entitled La Boda del Sapo y la Rana, just to see Vanessa’s reaction. She is totally into “cuentos,” so she loved that this song tells the story of the wedding between the toad and the frog. She was able to pick up on a lot of words and then I just retold her the story in simpler words. And, we listened to it again!
In researching a little bit more about Harp, I found out that the Mexican singer has dedicated her musical career to gathering information and rescuing the sounds of her country, in particular of her own state, Oaxaca. The songs on the CD go as far back as prehistoric Mayan times. In an interview, Harp explained that it took her over four years to research and gather all the songs she decided to include in Arriba del Cielo. Talk about a labor of love!
Anyhow, now that the CD has been rescued from the depths of the box full of baby toys, we will be listening to it a lot more.
Photo by Chicago 2016 Photos
The following is a guest post that came about after a conversation my cousin, her husband and I had over Christmas when they were visiting from Mexico. (I wrote about their visit here and here.) Anyhow, this is a topic I’ve been wanting to write about for some time—especially after having that interesting conversation last month. Well, my cousin, Magali Melgar Romero, beat me to it!
I know of two success stories concerning moms raising bilingual kids in Mexico City, where the official language is Spanish.
The first one is my sister-in-law. Julie is French, and she decided she would only speak French to her two daughters. For some time she felt embarrassed to speak in French with them when entertaining guests, or when non-French-speaking people were present, but then she realized this was silly and went ahead with her plan. Today my nieces (12 and 8 ) are fully bilingual. They can switch from Spanish to French at a moment’s notice, and they can even have simultaneous conversations in both languages without mixing them.
The other case is a friend whose mother is British and whose husband is Mexican. Becky speaks English to her kids (11 and 7). The children speak Spanish with their dad and at school. They have never mixed the two languages and they speak without an accent in both. They can pass for Mexican or British.
I have often wondered why this system has worked so well for these moms —and many others in the same circumstances in Mexico. Their kids never rejected the minority language, they were never embarrassed to speak it in the presence of friends, relatives, or strangers. And they never went through a phase of “understanding it but not speaking it.” Whether it’s French, Spanish, or English, these kids answer in the language they’re spoken to flawlessly and without mixing words.
Although this has plenty to do with the structure and inner workings of the brain, which is hard-wired to keep languages learned during early childhood in different, well-defined compartments, I believe there is another factor that helps these children accept the minority language —languages, ideas, and customs considered prestigious are easier to embrace.
Very early on, children can tell what has prestige in their community and what does not. When they see that other people neither understand them, nor are willing to make the slightest effort to, they begin to feel the general contempt in which their second language is held.
In Mexico, where speaking English or French confers status upon the speaker, bilingual kids realize that their second language gives them a considerable edge. Mom’s friends are full of praises for the little English-speaking genius. On the other hand, if the second language is one without prestige —such as native tongues in Mexico, or Spanish in the US— the children soon feel socially and culturally rejected, and develop defense mechanisms against their second language.
An effective way to lower the failure ratio is showing the kids that their second language is not an isolated phenomenon, that it is part of a whole different culture from a different country, and that it is associated with customs and traditions. The children must understand that many of their relatives speak it. If kids take pride in their roots they will not reject the minority language.
