LatinaLista — To be — bilingual or not to be! It’s a question that shouldn’t even be asked in this day and age. Thankfully, more and more parents and schools understand how important it is for children to speak both English, and in this case, Spanish.
Knowing Spanish isn’t just a good idea because Latinos now number over 50 million in the country, Univision is seriously challenging, and some weeks beating out, the U.S. television networks and salsa outsells ketchup as the leading condiment in the country but because Spanish is the dominant language on this side of the world stretching from the tip of South America to the U.S.-Mexico border.
It just makes sense that children be exposed to Spanish. Yet, the schools and libraries that can support such a worthwhile education with bilingual books are increasingly the victims of today’s budget axes. But a new contest hopes to rescue one school from cuts to their bilingual library budget.
The site SpanglishBaby: Raising Bilingual Kids is sponsoring the “My Bilingual School Library Contest.”
The site has joined together with several major bilingual/Spanish book publishers to award the winning school $500 worth of books.
The contest, now underway, is open to second and third grade students at all elementary public schools in the U.S. that have a dual language, bilingual (those with ELL programs) or Spanish language program.
To enter, the children, as a class, must create a poster honoring El Dia de los Niños/El Dia de los Libros — a nationwide observance celebrating its 15th anniversary this year of honoring children and literacy. The poster must be accompanied with a 5-sentence paragraph explaining why their school, library or Spanish program should win this contest and what winning would mean to them. All entries need to be emailed into SpanglishBaby.
The contest ends May 8, 2011.
