My Burgeoning Bilingual

Maybe it’s because she’s almost three-years-old, or because we’ve been spending so much time cloistered in the house together, but I’ve noticed a huge improvement in Maya’s language output as of recently. She’s been stringing along sentences and recounting stories in Spanish with increasing accuracy, and even her English vocabulary and lexicon has expanded. It also impressed me how she has begun to bridge the two languages, even code-switching when she switches between family members.

Although Sofia usually speaks directly to Maya in Spanish, Sofia’s preferred language is English, so it’s no surprise that Maya mimics almost everything her older cousin says. But she’s also spent a lot of time on FaceTime phone calls with my mom, who speaks only English. So the credit goes to Sofia and Memay for Maya's English language development during this time of quarantine.

Each morning, Maya gets up and comes into my room, where Francisco and I sleep with Teo’s crib next to our bed.

This morning, she came in, jumped on the bed, and yelled, “Get up!”

“Get up?” I repeated groggily and surprised to hear English come out her mouth so early.

“Que quiere decir ‘get up’?” I asked her.

“¡Despiértate!” she replied, and completely impressed me with her ability to translate the command.

A few nights ago, after she had listened to my mom read her a bedtime story in English, I tried to put Maya for bed. She wanted me to read the story to her again, and started to protest when I reached to turn off the light. “But!...” she began, and then looked me straight in the face and it was almost like I could see the language wheels and gears working within her mind. She had caught both of us off guard, because English is her language with Memay and Spanish is her language with Mami. After a moment, she recovered and self-corrected, saying to me in Spanish. “Pero quiero el libro otra vez.”

I was so pleased with her display of bilingualism, I read her the book again like she asked, but this time, translated each line into Spanish.

It's common for children raised in bilingual households to reach language benchmarks a little while after their monolingual peers, but now as I hear Maya referring to her favorite color as both green and verde, and her favorite food as both cheese and queso, I know she is developing into a strong emerging bilingual, and I look forward to watching her continue to grow.

Comments

Is 5 Little Monkeys Racist?

I’ve seen a lot of Tik Toks debunking children’s nursery rhymes lately. I have two toddlers, so now whenever I hear one of those rhymes, I think about their unsavory origins. But my son loves, loves Five Little Monkeys. He’s just learning to talk, and can almost say it by himself. I’ve thought about telling him to stop singing it since I learned in the original lyrics it’s not monkeys jumping on the bed, but he just gets so much joy from singing it as he jumps up and falls down, I thought... no harm, no foul, right? As long as he thinks the song is about monkeys, it’s ok. Until my niece came over one day, and the three toddlers were playing on an old mattress we have on the living room floor for them to jump around on. My son asked me to sing 5 Little Monkeys. At first it was cute, because they literally were jumping on the bed, but then I took a good look at the three of them. My kids are half-Guatemalan but very fair, like I am. Whereas my niece is half-black, and her ski...

Why You Should Travel with Little Kids

I took my first cross-country road trip when I was six-weeks-old. My parents loaded me up in an old Ford Wagoneer and drove me home from my dad's hometown of Pittsburgh, PA, to my hometown of Ojai, CA. After that, we traveled back and forth between the East Coast and the West Coast every summer of my life. A few times we flew, but most years we loaded up the car with the suitcases, the dogs, and the children and drove 3,000 miles across the country. This early exposure to travel instilled within me a joy of seeing the world, and since that first trip I have visited 34 states and 14 countries. And I hope to share that same joy with my own little ones. Traveling with children can be hard--it disrupts their nap schedules, may involve crossing timelines, and definitely pushes everyone beyond their comfort zones. But seeing different countries and different parts of our country as children gives them a greater appreciation for cultural and regional differences, and it widens their exper...

Toddler Morning Schedule in Spanish

Do you struggle to get your toddlers ready and out of the house on time in the morning? The past few morning in the Barrios house have been absolutely terrible. Maya usually wakes up early with me, but I let Mateo sleep until the last possible moment before we need to wake him up to get to school and work on time. This worked for a while, but this week we have left the house in tears. Since this is the kids' first year apart during the day, they miss each other so much. They want to play with each other in the mornings instead of getting ready, so I tried to think of a way to keep all of us on track. In order to help build their independence and organizational skills, I came up with a morning schedule for us to follow, with words and images. Then I placed a Maya copy and a Mateo copy in a clear dry-erase pocket and hung it in a central place by the kitchen. Now the kids know exactly what they need to do in order to get time to play with each other before school each mo...

Search This Blog