Join us and celebrate the Festival of Libraries with children’s literature and storytelling, coordinated by Magaly Flores, with the story The Spanglish Girl. The story was written by Natalia Simons, who works with bilingualism as a way of learning for children from early childhood.

In this story, we Anna, a little girl who spends her summers in a village in Spain with her grandparents. For the rest of the year, she lives in England. Although Anna visits Spain every year, she cannot speak much Spanish yet. She only speaks it a little bit at home, with her mum. The children in the Spanish village laugh at the way she talks; they say that Anna speaks differently than them. Her grandma reminds her how lucky she is to be able to speak two languages, Spanish and English, and to have two different cultures.

Natalia Simons comments “writing has always been a passion of mine, so when the pandemic hit, I had more time and I decided to write the book because I wanted to help bilingual children feel identified with a story and for monolingual children to learn Spanish and be aware of different cultures”.