Storytime Bilingüe featuring “La oruga muy hambrienta”

After the success of our first story time bilingüe featuring Siesta by Ginger Foglesong Guy, the kids and I have decided to fill the monotony of quarantine life with a weekly bilingual story time. Every Monday, we are going to record and produce a live reading of a children’s book in Spanish. This is our chance to show what our bilingual literacy at home looks like, and it will help us get excited about Mondays!

Because my co-stars are two-years-old and ten-months-old, we’ve learned we only have one shot to record, and our fist take is also our last take. Hopefully, the more live story times we do, the more we will all improve in front of the camera.

I chose to read La oruga muy hambrienta, which is the Spanish translation of the popular and beloved The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. I thought this would be good for a bilingual story time, because most English speakers have heard of it and have read it, so as I read in Spanish, they would know what I was saying. Additionally, this story has such beautiful images that illustrate the text so successfully, that a reader knows the story just by looking at the pictures (which is a great strategy when you are trying to read a text in the language you are learning or teaching!)

Unfortunately Mateo is not feeling well, so he’s not the most content participant in our read aloud, and his fussiness distracts and flusters me at the end of the book. I end up fumbling over my words a bit and mispronouncing “capullo,” which means “cocoon” in English. I wanted to reread the book again and do another take, but they kids couldn’t sit still and record any longer, and I was really impressed with how much they interacted with the text in the first take, we just couldn’t recreate that again! So I’m posting this version, even though it has a few errors, because that also is an example that everyone makes mistakes, and even bilingual Mami’s aren’t perfect all the time!

Amazon.com: The Very Hungry Caterpillar (9780399226908): Carle ...

Hope you enjoy our rendition of La oruga muy hambrienta, and check back next Monday to see what our next storytime bilingüe will be!

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