The Oxford First Words Series- First Spanish Words

Confession: I was one of those kids who read dictionaries. I'd sit with ones in Spanish, ones in English, Spanish-English ones and just pour over the words... I even had an Italian-Spanish dictionary I took with me when my mom would take me shopping with her (I had to be only 7 or 8, and Italian is not even a language I know!) Now, with three kids, a career, and a halfway-decent sleep schedule, dictionary reading doesn't get the time it once did, but I was thrilled when Oxford University Press asked me to review their First Spanish Words picture book for kids- it's basically a dictionary, only it's so chuli they're not calling it that.

The goal of the First Words series is to give kids a head start in language learning while their communication skills are still developing. The picture books accompany illustrations (by the talented David Melling) of a typical child's day with over 400 foreign words and their English translations. They also include supplementary material of a matching game, a counting page, shapes, opposites, weather and time.

I decided to test the book out on our older daughter, who is a very precocious 2 1/2. We sat together, I took her through the illustrations reading the vocabulary myself, and then I asked her to find things in the picture, in Spanish. She loved the challenge of pointing out the words she'd just learned and the adorable busyness of the illustrations made her giggle frequently, and definitely helped keep her engaged. We spent 30 minutes doing this, and might have gone longer, except her brother and sister woke up from nap. Another dictionary reader in the family? I think so.

But the First Spanish Words title is fun even for the less studious set. My husband and son spent some time reading and engaging with the book, and both enjoyed it. My husband said it helped him as an adult Spanish-language learner, and our son especially loved the pages featuring airplanes and dinosaurs.

I'd recommend the First Words series for bilingual as well as monolingual parents of toddlers/preschoolers/young school aged kids alike. It'll grow with your children as they grow in their bilingualism (or multilingualism- the series is available in French and German, too!). The worst case scenario is not that your kids won't like Oxford's First Spanish Words picture book, but that they'll like it so much, they'll wear it out.