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We Live Languages: A talk with Madalena Xanthopoulou

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If you listen to this podcast, you probably have a language vision or goal for your family. Our guest, Madalena Xanthopoulou, founded We Live Languages to help multilingual families reach those goals by translating research into actionable steps. Madalena is trilingual and raising trilingual kids. She shared some very useful ideas for families to increase exposure and form communities of support through which they can foster language.

Madalena Xanthopoulou of We Live Languages

The We Live Languages website has tons of resources for multilingual families; you can take a quiz to determine the language profile of your home and read stories of families that are similar to yours.

The company is also launching a free email series on May 20 to help parents raising multilingual children. Sign up here and make sure you follow them on social media @welivelanguages

Mentioned in this Episode

Grassroots Community Digital Kit – free download by We Live Languages

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Moco y Baba: A grassroots language community

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Having a community of support is such an essential part of raising bilingual children. Depending on the area you live in, finding that community can be hard – but it is possible to create your own. 

Johanna Arteaga, founder of Moco y Baba, and her daughter, Miranda.

Johanna Arteaga is the founder of Moco y Baba, a community of Spanish-speaking families in London. She also recently launched Cuéntamelo Books, an online bookstore that carries a curated selection of books from Latin America. Johanna talked to us about how she started Moco y Baba and gave us some tips and advice about how to start a language community in your area.

We talked to Johanna before COVID-19 completely changed the way we interact with each other and, although the group had to forgo in-person meetings temporarily, the community remains steadfast.

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What We Love: Tres Cuentos Podcast

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In this episode of What We Love/Lo Que Más Nos Gusta, we talk to Carolina Quiroga-Stultz about her podcast: Tres Cuentos. In Tres Cuentos, which means three stories, Carolina tells stories, myths and legends from Latin America in Spanish and English.

Carolina Quiroga-Stultz, creator of Tres Cuentos Podcast.

While most of the stories on Tres Cuentos are geared toward older children and adults, Carolina recently launched a summer series with stories geared toward younger children called Niñez Heroica/Children Heroes. Each episode includes a story followed by a few interesting facts about something related to the story.

In this episode …

The audio clip you heard at the beginning of this episode comes from the Tres Cuentos episode “Mitos de Creación: Cuando los ancestros bajaron del cielo“. You can listen to the same story in English here.

Carolina launched her children’s summer series after we spoke. Below are the two episodes she has published so far:

To find out when new episodes are published, follow Tres Cuentos on Facebook.

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Public libraries: Allies for bilingual families

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Public libraries are one of our nation’s most important resources. They support literacy, act as an inclusive gathering space for the community, and provide a plethora of public services. In this episode, we dive into how public libraries have been supporting bilingual families and how they can support you in your community.

City of North Miami Public Library
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What We Love: Conversation Starters

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How do you get your kids to engage with you in the target language? We don’t mean utilitarian exchanges about snacks or watching five more minutes of cartoons but actual conversations about interesting topics, concepts or just life, really.

It’s not as easy as it sounds, with our day-to-day lives we find ourselves not interacting as deeply with our loved ones, which is a problem in general, but poses particular issues for parents raising bilingual children. In this What we love/Lo que más nos gusta episode, we share how we get those conversations going.

Visit our blog post, Conversations & Storytelling: A Resource Guide for Bilingual Kids, to see our recommendations!

Join the Entre Dos Facebook community to share your experiences, questions, and discoveries with us and other parents raising bilingual kids.

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Music and Bilingualism

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Music is one of the easiest ways to start building a connection to language. Even if you’re not a musical person, there’s a universality to music that makes it an effective tool for transferring knowledge. We’ve seen it in our homes.

In this episode, we spoke to Dr. Susanne Reiterer, associate professor at the Faculty of Philology and Cultural Studies and the Center for Teacher Education in the University of Vienna, and to Will Stroet, an award-winning multilingual children’s music singer-songwriter and educator based in Vancouver.

 

You’ll hear about the connection between musicality and language learning and how music can be an effective tool to teach languages.

In preparation for this episode, we asked our listeners to share their favorite music and artists to listen to in their target language. See the full list of bilingual music recommendations. It’s a good one!

 

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Learning Spanish with the Kids

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This week on Entre Dos, we talk to Aileen Passariello-McAleer, of Mama-Lingua. She talks to us about her app, which is aimed at teaching both parents and kids Spanish, as well as her new book Simon Goes To School, which tackles the joys and challenges of attending a dual language school.

You’ll hear Aileen give advice about starting a target language playgroup and her thoughts on dual-language education in the U.S. Hint: she’s very passionate about his subject!

 

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What We Love: Bebé’s First Library

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In this special episode, Monika and Paula share some of their favorite books in Spanish for babies and young toddlers, and give a few tips on how to choose books for the younger crowd. It’s part of a series we’ll call What We Love/Lo Que Más Nos Gusta.

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Raising Bilingual Readers

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Reading has many benefits for children, and for bilingual children, reading in the language you’re trying to teach them is a fun, effortless way to help develop and maintain that language. For us at Entre Dos, reading has been an invaluable tool in developing our daughters’ Spanish. In this week’s episode, we speak to Vanessa Nielsen Molina of Sol Book Box, a subscription service that sends one Spanish-language or bilingual children’s book to your home every month.

Vanessa tells us how to choose quality books for children and how to encourage them to become readers. She also shares a few of her favorite children’s books in Spanish.

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Canticos: Sharing culture and building connections through music

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Music is a useful tool to expose kids to language and culture. Singing to or with your child is not only fun, it’s also a way to connect and introduce words, concepts, and sounds.

Susie Jaramillo is the co-founder of Canticos, a company that creates bilingual books, apps and videos for young children based on Latin American nursery rhymes. In this episode, she talks to us about what led her to start her business, how she feels her products create understanding among cultures and her tips for raising bilingual kids.

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