Maya has shown a lot of interest in the alphabet recently, so I figured it's time to start learning some letters. As a bilingual family and now that I'm doing homeschool preschool with the kids, I gave some thought as to whether I should teach the alphabet in English or Spanish first.  Since quarantine, Maya's English vocabulary has exploded. I think back to when my mom was worried that she wouldn't learn any English at all, and now Maya is nearly fluent without me having to explicitly teach her a word. Since she has been spending so much time with her English-speaking grandparents and watching children's programming in English, her vocabulary and fluency really bloomed. As soon as she figured out that English is the language of the community, she now demonstrates a preference for English. I continuously find myself having to remind her to speak in Spanish with my husband and me, so I decided it made most sense to focus on teaching her Spanish phonics. That way we ...

  We made the very, very difficult decision in the fall to not send my precocious 3-year-old to preschool this year, because we were worried about her starting school for the first time during the Corona Virus pandemic. So instead of being socialized and educated outside of our home, all of those experiences I needed to recreate for her and her 18-month-old brother at home, while also juggling working from home myself and following proper social distancing protocols.  Although Pinterest has a plethora of preschool and toddler activities, prepping for my own classes as a teacher and for my homeschool preschool for my children was overwhelming. So I am so grateful for Jane Cohen and the programs she offers through the Early Childhood Alliance of Framingham. Before quarantine, we often frequented her groups in-person, including Play, Learn, & Grow , and Let’s Go to Kindergarten and Baby Talk . Once the programming transitioned online, it became even easier for us to connect ...

La Mamita Barrios Preschool Class of One: Identifying Shapes This morning we used some leftover cut outs that I nabbed from the Holliston Public Library 's Play Learn and Grow group on Monday for our Preschool Class of One. They were perfect for Maya to practice her tactile skills of glue and paste, in addition to identifying the shapes in Spanish: cuadrados, triagulos, y circulos.  We divided the shapes into piles, while also identifying the colors and classifying by size, too, grande & pequeno. (The grande shapes Maya called "Mama" and the pequenos she called "bebe.") And it wasn't long before she realized she also had some colored circulos on her pijamas, too! #raisingemergingbilinguals #bilingualathome #bilingual #EnglishEspanol #espanolencasa #learningshapes #experientiallearning #tactileskills #cutandpaste #terribletwos #homeschoolpreschool #preschoolathome