Perla and I first met on a hot Saturday morning in July. It was the first week of the Arizona Latino Bloggers workshop, and the second I heard her intro I liked her so much. Let me tell you about how we decided to do a Spanish reading challenge together!

Perla blogs at ChicanaMama.com, where she writes about how being a Chicana influences her motherhood and shares beautiful pictures of her family (she’s also a photographer). As the weeks went on and we saw each other Saturday after Saturday, I learned that she has two little kids about the same ages as mine (and is pregnant again!). Perla is completely bilingual, and spoke to her oldest daughter in Spanish at first, but over time their family language shifted to English. One day while we were talking, she mentioned that she’d love to be more intentional about teaching her kids Spanish and I was like “!!!”

So we decided to try something.

Here’s what we came up with for our Spanish reading challenge:

  1. I would send Perla three Sol Book Boxes (one per week) to open with her kids.
  2. For those three weeks, she would commit to reading in Spanish with her kids for at least 15 minutes each day (choosing from the books I sent as well as from books they owned and library books).

I was (and am) sooo excited about this reading project, because I absolutely know that reading in Spanish has played a HUGE role in my children’s language journey. Here’s how I thought it could help Perla’s family: first, it gets kids and parents into the habit of speaking in Spanish to each other. If you’ve just finished reading a book in Spanish, odds are very good that you’ll continue to speak in Spanish for at least a while afterward.

And secondly, reading in Spanish builds vocabulary, which is crucial to helping kids feel confident in their ability to fully express themselves. And that’s true for parents, too! I can point to books that taught my daughter words that she now uses all the time, but I can also remember exactly which of her picture books taught ME new vocab (looking at you, “meadow”). Even if Spanish is your first language, like it is for Perla and me, if you’ve been in the U.S. for a while surrounded by English speakers it’s easy to forget things you once knew.

We’re on week two of the three-week challenge, and it was so fun to hear from Perla last week about how things were going (if you follow the Sol Book Box Instagram, you may have caught my Instagram Live with her last Saturday). Once we finish I’ll do a second post with what we learned, but for now I want to encourage you to do your own Spanish reading challenge with your kids! We chose three weeks because 1) that’s a length of time that feels doable and 2. the three-month Sol Book Box subscription is our most popular one.

15 minutes is about how long it takes us to read a couple of picture books, and it goes by so fast but the benefits linger. ¡Avísenme si se animan a intentarlo con sus familias!

(All photos by Perla of her daughter Yari (isn’t she the cutest!))