Skip to main content

Storytime Bilingüe featuring "Siesta," reprise

This past week, the United States celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Week of the Young Child, which recognizes early learning, young children, their teachers, families, and communities, and is sponsored by the National Association for the Education of Young Children

Locally, the Early Childhood Alliance of Framingham hosted the first Framingham Virtual Family Fair, which brought together community partners who showcased live and rerecorded content for kids ages 0-6 and their families. We were happy to participate as presenters and share a live Play Learn & Grow Bilingual group on Monday, in which we sang songs, read a book and did an activity, while developing vocabulary in English and Spanish. 

And, we produced a very special edition of Storytime Bilingue for the event. In celebration of the Week of the Young Child and our anniversary of our Storytime Bilingue series, we reread the very first book we used for our inaugural bilingual story time, back when the social distance quarantine started in early Spring 2020. We had no idea how our story time would progress over the past year, and more than 30 episodes later, we are so happy to be able to provide literacy-based bilingual content in English and Spanish for families all over the world! 

If you would like to see our very first episode of Siesta, check it out the blog post I wrote about it back in March 2020. I can't believe how much Maya and Mateo and I have grown since then! 

Siesta is a beautiful bilingual celebration of colors and the Latino-American culture. It is well-loved favorite for us to read before nap time or bed time.

Thank you for accompanying us on this journey of raising emerging bilinguals, and we look forward to another year of developing language and literacy skills together. 




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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...