If you want to learn more about Spanish-language storytimes and some great books to get you started, Booklist just published an article featuring my debut picture book Abuelita and I Make Flan in this article!
It's a super long URL, though, but here is the link to the online version.
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Tagged Books, children's books, Language
I wanted to share the pronunciation Guide for Readers of ABUELITA AND I MAKE FLAN. Here I read the glossary which includes all the words in Spanish in case you or your readers want to know how we say them.
For more Flan-related activities, scroll down to the activities here on my site.
Or access all my book related activities here.
Adriana Hernández Bergstrom is a Cuban-American artist and children’s book author-illustrator. She loves languages and literacy and is the author-illustrator of ABUELITA AND I MAKE FLAN (Charlesbridge, 2022), TUMBLE (Scholastic, 2023) and COUNTDOWN FOR NOCHEBUENA (Little, Brown, 2023).
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Tagged Books, children's books, kidlit, Kids, Language
Teachers, parents, grandparents and fans of Countdown for Nochebuena, I finally uploaded that video of me reading the Spanish language words from the book! It's a pronunciation guide for anyone who wishes to say the words how we say them in my family. I have a Cuban-American accent since my first language is Spanish as taught to me by my Cuban grandparents and parents, but I grew up in Miami.
If you'd like to book me for a school visit, I can read my books (act them out too) for your students or library patrons, check out my events for details: https://adriprints.com/pages/events
And there are loads of activity pages for this book! You can find them here.
Hope this is helpful! Let me know if you need language guides on anything else.
Lately Ian has been saying "no" a lot. He's certainly picked up its contrarian-toddler "NO!" sort of context, but mostly he just uses it incorrectly. It's become his all-purpose reply to everything. No means no, except for when it means yes, which is most of the time. The difference between no-no and yes-no can be determined through context, body language, and, to an extent, tone.
One of my majors in college was linguistics, and I took a couple of courses on language development. I have to admit that watching a new little human being learn how to speak and understand has always been one of the things I looked forward to the most about parenthood, and thus far Ian hasn't disappointed! He's quite the little chatterbox...he talks nearly constantly, although not much of it is understandable yet. There are quite a few things he says entirely correctly (kitty, puppy, pizza, to name a few) but my favorite words are the ones he says incorrectly.
Some of my favorite mispronunciations:
shucks: trucks
shanes: trains
a-BEE bowds: Angry Birds (he is OBSESSED - although he can't actually play it)
sou-side: outside
dook: book
book: milk
cheetos: Cheerios (He's never had Cheetos. How confusing.)
sheeshees: Goldfish (as in the snack, not the pet)
ah-pa-pits: opposites (he doesn't know what it means yet, as far as I know, but LOVES the book Opposites by Sandra Boynton, and requests it frequently)
bupf: up (he gets bupf and down confused quite frequently, as with no/yes)
owf: off
Soso: Grover
He also has some sentence constructions that I find absolutely adorable. "Ee eh Mommy's" translates to "It is Mommy's" -- it sounds almost romance-language-esque, no? He usually says it as he's handing me something he's retrieved from elsewhere in the house...a ball of yarn, my purse, a potato. And the other day after Jim left the room, Ian looked around, threw his hands up in the universal ????? gesture, and said "Oh di Daddy go???" A four-word sentence! That's gotta be SOME kind of milestone, right?
My other favorite thing? He apologizes. ALL THE TIME. I'm walking through the kitchen carrying a basket of laundry, and he steps out of the way. "Sowwy, mommy." He steps on a book as he hops down off the couch: "Sowwy, dook." I tell him to stop pulling the cat's tail because it's not nice: "Sowwy, kitty." But my favorite: the other day he was sitting in his highchair eating a snack of goldfish, and he was looking intently at them before popping them in his mouth. "Sowwy, sheeshees." Apologizing to his snack: we must have a budding vegetarian on our hands.
