If you have children, you've heard time and time again how important it is to read to them on a daily basis. Well, t__his is even more so when you're raising bilingual children.__ While listening to you speak Spanish is by far the best way to ensure they're getting direct exposure to the language, listening to you read in Spanish is wonderful too! Books can make a huge difference when it comes to enriching your child's vocabulary. The more varied the topics of the books, the more diverse your kid's vocabulary will be.
This is particularly true if you don't feel like your own Spanish vocabulary is extensive because you'll most likely be learning a lot of new words along the way too.
My advice is to start reading as early as possible–even if it seems ridiculous to you to read a book to a newborn baby. While you can get some baby board books in Spanish, the truth is that if you already have some in English, you can just use those and just translate the text. Board books normally have simple vocabulary words.
Read more ¿Qué más?: Bilingual bebés on board: 5 apps to help your kids speak more Spanish
As your child gets a bit older, a great idea is to get a few bilingual books, which means they come in both languages and can be read in each language by different people. So this is great if, for example, your husband only speaks English because he can read the book in that language, while you read the same book in Spanish. Luckily, today there are many options when it comes to bilingual children's books. I promise to share some of our favorites in a futre post.
Once your kids learn how to read, don't think that you no longer need to read to them because nothing could be further from the truth. One of the things I most like to do with my first-grade daughter is to read her some of the books I loved when I was her age and she gets so happy!
