Four-year-old Nayla Rodriguez is doing the San Diego County Library’s “1000 books before Kindergarten” program in Spanish and has so far read more than 300 books.
Her mother Cecy Rodriguez, a San Diego County middle/high school teacher, says she decided to speak 100% in Spanish to Nayla since she is confident her daughter will quickly learn English once she begins school. The two read for 20 minutes every night, a goal promoted by educators as a way to exceed norms in language skills.
“I believe it is important to start reading at a young age to develop language skills. I also want to expose Nayla to different cultures and ethnicities from around the world at a young age,” she says.
Our program Education Begins in the Home provided Nayla with 4 bilingual books—The Wooden Bowl / El bol de madera; Freaky Foods from Around the World /Platillos sorprendentes de todo el mundo; Lucas and His Loco Bean, A Bilingual Tale of the Mexican Jumping Bean; and It’s Okay to Be Different / Está bien ser diferente!—by Award-Winning Author Ramona Winner. We would like to thank Ms. Winner, who previously donated 4,500 copies of the first two books to our efforts to put books in the hands of our children in North County San Diego. Our program has given over 208,000 FREE books since May 2015, thanks to donations like hers.
We also provided Nayla with two 1st-grade Mexican textbooks donated to our program by the Mexican Consulate in San Diego—Lengua materna en espanol and Conocimiento del medio. Over the past few years, several organizations have given us more than 3,500 textbooks, including the Mexican Consulate and Universidad Popular, a key collaborator of ours. We want to thank both groups for their ongoing support.
