Language Lizard Update

Dear Reader:

I recently attended a school reunion where I saw a friend whom I had not seen in seven years. I was so impressed by my friend’s and her husband’s dedication to raising their children to be bilingual. She speaks only Spanish to their children, while her husband speaks English to them. The family makes an effort to send the children to camps and to travel where they are able to interact with other bilingual children and Spanish speakers. They also have a Spanish-speaking childcare provider.

Our readers and customers are similarly passionate and dedicated to raising their children bilingually and to supporting the language development of bilingual students, often with limited resources.  To support your educational efforts, and to encourage an increased interest in other cultures among your students, I invite you to look at our Blog for tips, links to research, and even fun posts about unusual international folktale characters!  A few of our more recent blog posts are noted below and you can click on the links to read the full articles.

We continue to change and add to our website to make it more user friendly and to better meet our customers’ needs. Many teachers and librarians have asked for "book sets," so they do not have to go through our website individually selecting titles in a particular language. In response to this request, we have added 5-BOOK and 10-BOOK SETS in some of the more popular languages.  BOOK SETS currently are available in Arabic, Bengali, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Gujarati, Haitian Creole, Portuguese, Russian, Somali, Spanish, Urdu, and Vietnamese.

We also get many requests to add new languages. While it is impossible to accommodate everyone, we are pleased to announce that we now have a few titles in Dutch, Latvian, Malay, Norwegian, and Swedish.

Keep the feedback coming, and happy reading!

Anneke Forzani
President and Founder
Language Lizard, LLC

P.S. We are thrilled to have been given a "Best Back To School Website" award by Howtolearn.com (http://www.howtolearn.com/best-websites/best-back-to-school-websites-august-2013/).

P.P.S.  You can now find Language Lizard on Pinterest at www.pinterest.com/languagelizard

*Subscriber Special Offer*: Now through November 15th, we are offering a 10% Discount on Welcome to the World Baby, simply apply Coupon Code CCS-Baby upon checkout.

To see the difficulty level of these and other Language Lizard books, please visit our “Book Suggestions” page at  http://www.languagelizard.com/images/Childrens_Bilingual_Books.pdf

Language Lizard Blog Articles

• A recent article published by The National Center for Cultural and Linguistic Responsiveness (NCRR) contends that bilingual books describing different cultures must be “culturally accurate.” This means that stories should not contain stereotypes, but rather should depict “authentic representations of the culture.” Our latest blog article From Hiccups to Tuk-Tuks: Our Selection of Culturally Appropriate Bilingual Children’s Books discusses what to look for in a culturally-appropriate bilingual book, and how many of our Language Lizard offerings meet that standard.
  
  
• Did you know that October is The Bilingual Child Month? This blog article has some great ideas on how to celebrate: http://blog.languagelizard.com/2012/10/16/the-bilingual-child-month-is-here-again/.
  
  
• Who is the Monkey King? Find out here!
  
  
• With Thanksgiving right around the corner, check out some Thanksgiving-related discussion ideas for your multilingual and multicultural classroom.