Skip to main content

Storytime Bilingüe featuring "Pine & Boof The Lucky Leaf"

There's nothing like the great outdoors on a windy spring day, and so on the nicest day of spring break we ventured to the Delcarte Reservoir in Franklin to meander their story walk. Each season, the Franklin Public Library adorns the trail with pages from a nature-themed book.

Last fall, we read Goodbye Summer, Hello Autumn, and had an adventurous time, tromping through the woods and reading each page. So we were excited to return to read the Spring 2021 story, Pine & Boof The Lucky Leaf.

This time, we had a special guest reader, 9-year-old emerging bilingual, Cesar! He came to the US from Guatemala three years ago, and has worked so hard to learn English. Now in third grade, he shows off his English skills and reads aloud each page. We recorded just using my iPhone, so the sound quality isn't the best. There's rustling leaves, wind, and train noises in the background, but Cesar perseveres and shares with us this delightful story.

Cousins are often referred to as one's first friends, and this is no different for Maya and Mateo. Cesar and Ivanna are their best friends, and even though their ages vary greatly, you can see just how well they get along and how much they love to spend time together.

So join us for this special edition of story time bilingue!


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 skin happens

Storytime Bilingüe featuring “Buenas Noches Luna”

This week's Storytime Bilingue features Buenas Noches Luna , the Spanish translation of the beloved children's book Good Night Moon by Margaret Wise Brown. We love the vivid language and images, and the black and white contrast pages are particularly compelling for the little ones whose eyesight is still developing. You'll see how much Mateo interacts with the book during this reading! This is a story I have nearly memorized, because I read it to Maya consistently before bed during our bedtime routine. We've read it so much, she practically has it memorized, too. Sometimes she likes me to read it aloud, and sometimes she likes to "read" the book by describing the images. I actually wrote about her as an emerging bilingual reader in my earlier blog post,  Today a Reader, Tomorrow a Leader , but the highlight of that post is that research shows repeated readings of the same book really benefit early literacy and vocabulary acquisition. For that reason I

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