Learning French with Pomelo the garden elephant What is it? A series of eleven French picture books written by Ramona Bădescu and illustrated by Benjamin Chaud that explore the world from the perspective of a small pink ‘garden elephant’. It is obvious that Pomelo is not y
Countdown to Kindergarten Our daughter has now been accepted into our first choice kindergarten – the fine arts program at Nootka school. Even though this program was listed as our third choice in my blog Choosing a Kindergarten Program back in November, after visiting a few sch
How are we doing? It’s been 6 months since I wrote about our bilingual goals and action plan. I’m now ready to revisit those goals and see what we’ve accomplished and what has changed since then. Bilingual To-do List Round Two 1. Decide which languages are important
The Language of Los Abuelos Francisco Gabilondo Soler, better known as Cri-Cri El Grillito Cantor (Cri-Cri the Little Singing Cricket), was probably the most popular singer-songwriter of Spanish-language children’s music of the 20th century. I remember reading about Cynthia̵
One Family, Two Cultures In a perfect world we would be able to balance our time evenly between Mexico and Canada, and we hope to achieve this in the next few years to ensure that our daughter continues to feel influenced by both languages and both cultures. This past weekend marked t
A Song by Kukama Children in Defense of their Native Language This video features a beautiful song and rap by the children of Nauta, Loreto in the Peruvian Amazon about saving their native language, Kukama-Kukamiria. The children go around removing the tape that covers each other̵
How can we maintain bilingual balance? It has already started. She hasn’t even entered Kindergarten yet and she is already speaking more English than Spanish. All of a sudden my house is full of English. I find myself thinking more in English, and now that both my wife and my da
Is French Immersion a good choice for our family? The other day we went to register our daughter for Kindergarten. This is a big deal, she’s growing up so fast! We also attended an Information session about French Immersion with the Vancouver School Board where parents expressed
Dedication in Rural Education Over the last two months, I have been travelling to small communities in the Cusco region of Peru for our (UNICEF) research project on intercultural bilingual schools. It has been a beautiful, educational, and humbling experience for me. The goal of Inter
Thoughts on planning my (yet-to-exist) children’s linguistic futures My life has entered baby season. My Facebook news feed is filled with pictures of toddlers dressed up for Halloween and sitting on Santa’s lap. I’ve been spending time with a close friend’s newborn, and&
