Bilingual Tots: 16-17 months

Since starting back at work this month, I´ve hardly had time for anything,let alone blogging,particularly as Chloe has been going through a rather clingy stage,meaning that I could hardly get anything done!! Anyway, I thought it was about time for an update even though there doesn‘t seem to be that much to report.                                                                     I was hoping that going to nursery school and our bilingual playgroup would encourage her language skills but I can‘t see much evidence of it yet . So far the words she can say are no, mama, papa, wow~wow(for dog), mas and more,ta(but she doesn‘t always say it), uh~oh, ba(for ball) and pa for pan. She can also make more animal noises such as moo and “coco“ for cock~a~ doodle~doo although the previous animal noises she could make, she no longer does! Even though she mainly says wow~wow for a dog,it‘s also starting to mean any animal. She also tries to repeat what we say occasionally for example the other day we were saying “bye bye granny“ and Chloe said something like“ay ay anie!" and another time I was saying to her "one more" and she repeated it quite clearly!Just the other day she started making the noise of a train "choo-choo!". I am pretty certain that she now understands 100% of what we say.

Apart from that,there isn´t much more that I can add! We are continuing to read to her in both languages and    she points to different things,for example in Goodnight Moon,she points to the red balloon and the two kittens although not always!!!I sing different songs and nursery rhymes to her...lately we´ve been singing Head,Shoulders,Knees and Toes and The Wheels On The Bus quite a lot.She touches her head when we sing Head,Shoulders,Knees and Toes and occasionally her nose(which reminds me she also points to her nose or mine and says "noe"meaning nose!!)and she does some of the actions to The Wheels On The Bus!!

Here are some more interesting websites that I have come across while trying to find out more about bilingualism and raising bilingual or multilingual children.The first is InCultureParent, an online magazine with tips and articles about raising multicultural children or global citizens.It has some good articles about bringing up multilingual or bilingual children, recipes,crafts and much more!Another great website is Mama Lisa, which contains children´s songs from all around the world, an English translation and even a MP3 recording which you can listen to the song and even the sheet music (I think it may even be possible to download both of these things!!)

Roll up,Roll up for September´s Bilingual Carnival!

Things have been very hectic lately especially since I started back at work after the summer hols, I´ve barely had time for blogging or much else,particularly as Chloe has been very clingy lately. This is just a quick post to remind you that September´s Bilingual Blogging Carnival is here.....if you haven´t already checked it out!!!September´s Carnival is hosted by All Done Monkey and has some really interesting posts and I´ve also discovered some great new blogs.Better late than never I always say....even if soon October´s Carnival will be here too!!! I´m also pleased to say that one of my posts was also featured in September´s Carnival!!

Spanish Resources for Non-Native & Native Parents

Although I´m the minority language parent which means I mainly speak English to my daughter and sing English nursery rhymes and songs and read English books but it occured to me that Spanish resources may be hard to come by. Even my Spanish husband, sister-in-law and mother-in-law seem to stick to the same old Spanish nursery rhymes...Cinco Lobitos and Palmas Palmitas....I did learn Pica Pica Pollito too off my cleaner but my husband doesn´t really seem to know many nursery rhymes and even though my daughter will probably learn a lot of nursery rhymes at nursery school and school, I thought it might be a big help for those non-native and native parents alike to have a list of Spanish resources. I hope you find this useful!!

Here is a Spanish version of the English lullaby "Rock-A-Bye Baby" called "Duérmete niño", which has the Spanish lyrics and the English translation.I also found another version of Duérmete niño on YouTube. The material for nursery came with a CD which includes some popular Spanish nursery rhymes such as "Aserrín, Aserrán"....there also appears to be many versions of this nursery rhyme, here´s one version and here are some other versions. Another is Date,date,date, which uses gestures to play with baby.I keep telling my husband he has to learn them so he can sing them to her!

The CD also has some traditional or popular stories on it. Garbancito is Spain´s answer to Tom Thumb (at least that what it seems like!).Here are two versions, one in YouTube and the other written so you can tell it to your children yourself.Another tale is the story of La ratita presumida which tells the story of a vain mouse who finds a coin,you´ll have to listen to the story to find out what he spends it on and what happens next!

Cartoons and TV programmes are also a good way to increase your child´s imput of a foreign language and at the same time raise culture awareness too. My daughter mainly watches cartoons etc in English as that is the minority language but sometimes I let her watch cartoons in Spanish too, especially if they are of Spanish origin. Some good Spanish cartoons are Los Lunnis, which is shown on the Spanish children´s TV channel, Clan and can also maybe be accessed online and on Amazon es.Los Lunnis is a series of brightly coloured puppets that sing and dance etc and are similar to The Muppets or Sesame Street!Pocoyo is another cartoon about a little boy called Pocoyo and his friends and their adventures, the characters don´t speak much and much of the story is told by the narrator.Again, Pocoyo is shown on Clan and here is a link to the official Pocoyo webpage.

I´m sure there are many more traditional songs and nursery rhymes, stories, books and cartoons and TV programmes from Spain and South America but these are just a handful to help non-native and native parents alike! If you have any more you can add or suggest, I´d be grateful.

Bilingual Bubbas: Setting up a bilingual playgroup

As the city I live in is fairly small and there aren´t any bilingual playgroups, my friends and I decided to set up our own with our bilingual bubbas.Seeing that there is only a few of us, we´ve decided to take it in turns holding it at each other´s houses and that we are going to meet every Saturday at 11am as due to work commitments etc, that is the only day that we can all get together at the same time.

At the moment there are only the six of us, 3 mums and 3 babies, although I did mention it to two other British friends who have babies but they haven´t shown much interest yet unfortunately!I suppose I could advertise but then we might be inundated with Spanish parents wanting to bring their children and really I just wanted to keep it only for native speakers and their children or in other words, proper bilingual children as it just wouldn´t be the same with parents who don´t speak English or don´t always speak to their children in English as then the majority language might start creeping in or worse our children could pick up grammatical mistakes or mispronunciation errors from the Spanish parents. Don´t get me wrong, I´m not trying to exclude people here and I have nothing against Spanish parents joining but I´m just concerned about what effect it could have on our children´s own language. In fact, one of my friends´ Spanish friend and her child may be joining us for awhile or until her second child is born (She´s due in October so not long!)We could do with a few more people though so the whole thing just doesn´t fizzle out.

The first "meeting" took place at my house and we sang Five Little Monkeys and did some actions to it which I think they enjoyed....unfortunately there is a bit of a gap between my daughter and Bilingual Bubba 1 to Bilingual Bubba 3, a difference of a year but anyway at least Bilingual Bubba 3 can listen and take it in subconsiously!I then read "Dear Zoo" to them and my daughter and Bilingual Bubba 1 enjoyed seeing the animals,making the animal noises and opening or lifting the flaps.We then let them have free play while we had a chat and refreshments!It was fun and seemed quite successful. Bilingual Bubba 1 calls my daughter Coco as she can´t pronounce Chloe yet and Chloe seems to have picked that up off her so I think it´s working although it´s still early doors so we´ll have to wait and see!

The following week Chloe was ill so we called it off and then the next week one of the Bilingual Bubbas couldn´t make it but we still went ahead with the playgroup with my daughter and Bilingual Bubba 3, otherwise the playgroup will definitely just die its death particularly if we keep cancelling it every time someone can´t make it!Anyway, I´ll be reporting on our activites and updating the progress of our bilingual playgroup from time to time and we´ll see how it all pans out! I´d love to hear from any of you who go to a bilingual playgroup and your experiences or if you set up your own bilingual playgroup!

First week at nursery school!

This week was a difficult and emotional one because it was Chloe´s first week at nursery school and her first time ever really being apart from us.As I work in the afternoons,she is going to nursery school in the afternoons for about 4 hours. Unfortunately,many nursery schools where I live are shut in the afternoons and due to the crisis, even more are choosing to shut in the afternoons because there is little or no demand for nursery schools in the afternoons. After my search for a nursery school which you can read about here, I´m very happy with our final choice. It´s one of the best nursery schools in my city, is open in the afternoons, does activities in the afternoon and is the nursery school that is the closest to being a bilingual nursery school.

The first day came and we dressed her in her little nursery uniform(a bit ridiculous a nursery school having a uniform but at least her clothes will keep clean!).They have a summer uniform till October, girls wear a little blue and white striped dress, boys wear a blue and white striped knickerbocker/shorts type thing....I haven´t really paid as mcuh attention to the boys´uniform!!In winter, they have a different uniform...not sure what it´s like yet, plus a" baby",which is like a smock, to protect their uniform.That cost 50 euros already and we haven´t even bought the winter uniform yet!

When it came time to drop her off,she screamed, cried and tried to cling on to my husband for dear life. It was awful and we felt so bad leaving her. We rang after an hour to see how she was and they said she was ok but she was having her moments of crying.We went to pick her up after two hours and she was very happy to see us. This scenario was repeated the following two days although on the third day,she did stop crying for a little while but started again when the nursery nurse took her off me.She didn´t go the rest of the week as Wednesday night she started with a high temperature(which could´ve been down to teething though too!) and she was full of a cold...I hope it´s not a sign of things to come!!!

When we spoke to the head of the nursery school, she told us that she liked being sung to and that she had stopped crying when she heard English!We were given a list of materials we had to provide which included glue,crayons (and they had to be a certain brand!!!),a pad of different coloured card, non-slip socks, white finger paint, glitter gel,EVA rubber, 500 sheets of blank paper...I think that was everything!!I was really surprised....I never had to buy all that stuff for school,never mind for nursery!!!She´s only 1!We also paid for the "books" they use "El Conejita Juguetona"(another 35 euros!), which also comes with a CD with all the songs she´s going to learn, animal sounds and everyday sounds such as breathing etc and two English nursery rhymes "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" and " Pat-a-cake,Pat-a-cake". My daughter is already familiar with these two rhymes as I sing them to her occasionally.

The nursery has two English speakers,one of which is native English and the other is bilingual although she speaks English with a Spanish accent. I was disappointed to learn that the native only works in the mornings and that children who go in the mornings get 5 hours of English, in other words they have 1 hour of English every day whereas the children in the afternoons only get 2 hours of English per week(and with the bilingual person not the native unfortunately). I don´t see why kids that go in the afternoon should suffer and get less than their morning peers but I suppose the afternoons are shorter! So it´s definitely not as bilingual as I´d have liked!Maybe I will see if she can go once a week in the mornings too although  it probably doesn´t matter so much as she´s still going to hear a lot of English off me!

I´m hoping that her time in nursery will encourage her speaking in both languages and that her talking will come on in leaps and bounds....we´ll just have to see how it goes!!

Devoradores de libros: Spanish bookworms

Most of the books on my daughter´s bookshelf are English mainly because due to living in Spain I figured that it  is much easier for her to borrow Spanish books from the library or from her friends and cousins, than borrowing English books.Another reason is that many Spanish children´s books seem to be translations of English books or books written by authors from different countries,such as France, Germany, Holland etc. There appears to be a bit of a gap in Spanish literature of books for babies and toddlers. I remember asking a few bookshops and even a librarian if they could reccommend me a classic Spanish children´s book like The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Guess How Much I Love You or Dear Zoo? but none of them could give me an answer!!! Surely there must be some classic Spanish story?

I decided to do this post so that you can discover some good (at least I think so anyway!) Spanish children´s books but I´m always on the lookout for more and would be grateful for any other suggestions,particularly from any of my Spanish readers!!

One of my favourites is El Dragón frío by Andrés and Ana Guerrero, which I borrowed from the library. I don´t own a copy unfortunately as haven´t seen it in any bookshops but maybe you can order it directly from the publishers? It is a sweet,simple story about a dragon that can´t breathe fire and is illustrated simply but colourfully.Andrés and Ana Guerrero have written quite a few other toddler´s/children´s books and I think we have read them all or at least most of them but El Dragón frío remains my favourite.

Although I knocked the English translated versions of  Tento stories, I did think they seemed good stories and after buying this for a friend´s daughter and seeing that it was a sweet story, I decided to buy it for Chloe. There is a series of Tento books but so far we´ve only bought and read this one, Tento y El Regalo de Mamá by Ricardo Alcántara and illustrated by Gusti. Tento is a little dog, who in this particular story doesn´t know what present to give to his mum and the book tells us his search for the present and what present he eventually decides to give her....I won´t reveal the ending but it is very sweet and tender! The illustrations are again simple but cute and colourful.I have seen it reccommended for 2 yr olds but we read it to Chloe and she enjoys it now at only 15mnths old!!

Anyway,these are my two favourite Spanish toddler books, which I reccommend any native or non-native parents to read to their children in Spanish.I´d love to hear any reccommendations for other Spanish/ South American toddler´s books, which are preferably not translations!

First trip to the UK/ Bilingual Babies: 14-15 months

There were a number of reasons I wanted to go to the UK this year, some of them being to see friends and family, to escape the heat of Spain, because I haven´t been for about two years but one of the main reasons being for the sake of Chloe´s English. However, in hindsight with only being 14 months old, maybe this year the trip wasn´t so worthwhile as maybe she´s still a tad too young to have got the most out of it,particularly as she isn´t even speaking much yet.
    One of the things I have also realised after our trip to the UK is that bringing up a child bilingually is not cheap and this concludes with the following articles from Multilingual Living and Hiragana Mama but in my opinion it is definitely worth it or will be worth it in the long run!First of all,my husband could only take his holidays in August which automatically makes it more expensive, then despite the area where I´m from not being very touristy, all the holiday houses were extortionate...we managed to find one slightly less extortionate for the two weeks. I thought that the Olympics wouldn´t affect the prices of flights, houses etc as  we were based in the North but little did I know that some of the football matches were held in Manchester,which might also have affected prices.We also hired a car for the duration of our stay, luckily we upgraded the car to a bigger one as the five of us plus all the suitcases and the buggy would´ve been a bit of a squash! We ended up taking our car seat with us otherwise to hire a carseat for Chloe for two weeks would´ve cost a further 100 pounds!!!

  Anyway, after researching the travel tips on Babycentre and German In the Afternoon, which were very useful and helpful, our flight (Chloe´s first time on a plane!) went smoothly...we read a couple of books and did some nursery rhymes and finger plays.
 We stayed in a comfortable and clean bungalow in Haslingden, which had great views from the living room window.My parents joined us for the first week of our holidays, which meant that Chloe had almost total immersion in the minority language!! Unfortunately, the weather was typically British in that it rained almost every day but we were pretty lucky as it always seemed to rain when we were in the car, having lunch or visiting something indoors!!

  We visited Chester Zoo,which was a great day out, visited the Lake District and discovered some British culture at Beatrix Potter World...(Chloe loved all the fake animals straight out of Beatrix Potter´s books!). I also met up with one of my friends,her husband and their baby, who´s about a month younger than Chloe, in Blackpool and went to the Sea Life Centre. We also met up with the majority of my family for Sunday lunch and Chloe had a great time playing with my cousin´s children and then met up with my stepdad´s family too and their little girl, who´s  about two weeks younger than Chloe. They seemed to get on very well! So she´s had plenty of interaction with other children and adults all of which are monolingual.

 The second week my husband´s parents came,which unfortunately meant that Chloe was once again almost totally surrounded by Spanish.We visited Chester, the Lake District (this time we did a lake cruise!),
Chipping,Clitheroe and Downham and York. Chloe enjoyed walking around the York Castle Museum, which gives a great insight into British history, particularly the Victorian street,which takes you back to England in Victorian times,and she also liked Jorvik Viking Centre,which tells you about York after the Vikings invaded. The trouble is I guess we´ll have to revisit them when she´s older as she won´t remember it now or learn as much from it at this age! I also showed my in-laws where I´m from and the houses I have lived in and we visited Hoghton Tower.We also visited my aunt and saw my cousin,his wife and their children and had an English tea,with tea,sandwiches including egg and salmon, various English cheeses, Pimms and cakes.While we were in the UK we ate a lot of typical British food, such as crumpets,English muffins, teacake, roast pork with all the trimmings, sticky toffee pudding....even an English breakfast in the airport on the return journey to Spain...Chloe too! She enjoyed her first taste of baked beans too!

On to the language part,I had hoped this trip would stimulate Chloe´s speaking especially in English and I think it did but not to the level I had hoped for....I guess this language acquisition takes time particularly if you have to acquire two languages at the same time! As I mentioned in my last post, Chloe has been saying mas or ma´ for more or if she wanted something but after the first week with my parents,it started to sound more like "more". Then my inlaws came and it went back to "ma" but she would often say both words so it would go "Ma..more". I don´t know if she´s starting to distinguish the two languages and realise that she has to speak in different languages with different people...probably not.She´s just probably repeating both words but it seemed like she directed the "more"at me. Her animal noises are improving and she is trying to repeat them....every time she sees a dog,she says wow,wow.In fact, I think that´s her name for the dog!!She´s also trying to repeat words or noises that we say or she hears. She now says Uh-oh if we say it when she drops something etc and the other day she was playing with her Chicco mobile phone and pressing the numbers and she repeated "four" after pressing the number four button and it sounded very clearly like four....the thing is she probably won´t say it again now at least for some time anyway!