Making Babies Bilingual: A Surefire, Practical Approach to Raising a Bilingual Child Naturally

By Ammon Jones

Making Babies Bilingual walks you through the journey of a young couple who wanted to pass down their second languages to their children. The author makes a strong case for parents to dutifully teach their children a second language as we strive to unite an innovative but divided human race in peace and harmony. He also demonstrates his knowledge of language acquisition derived from both the classroom as well as real life experiences. Within its pages you discover a simple yet realistic practical approach to raising children that know more than one language. His passion and love for family and effective communication among all people is evident throughout these pages and his subtle humor makes it an enjoyable read for anyone even dabbling with the idea of teaching a foreign language.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ammon Jones
• Release date: Nov 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005374150

Ammon Jones

Ammon Jones is a lifelong student of English and Spanish. In 2012, he earned a BA in Spanish Translation from Brigham Young University with a minor in English.Ammon and his wife taught several of their kids Spanish, like really taught them to the point that they often required interpreters in their toddler years. But everything is OK now! This experience led Ammon to write and publish Making Babies Bilingual: A Surefire, Practical Approach to Raising a Bilingual Child Naturally.Because he has worked for a doctor for the past 10 years, Ammon is known to have drawn blood, give shots and a plethora of other medical housekeeping items.His wife Randi homeschools their six children and maintains the family blog while he writes in the bedroom and sometimes records books through a microphone. Ammon no longer hates the sound of his own voice.

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Making Babies Bilingual

A Surefire, Practical Approach to Raising a Bilingual Child Naturally

Copyright 2020 Ammon Jones

Published by Ammon Jones at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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Table of Contents

Prologue

Language Defined

Why?

Criticism

When?

Toddler Years

And Beyond

Pitfalls

For Life

Prologue

From a very young age, I have been fascinated with bilingualism. I am considered mostly Caucasian, white or gringo, although I do love claiming my heritage as ¼ Costa Rican. My maternal grandmother is a full-blooded tica (Costa Rican female), but my grandfather is Caucasian and my mother, ½ tica, married a Caucasian. So, the way the math works out, the equivalent of about one of my meaty legs is Hispanic.

I grew up in Florida where a high percentage of the population speaks more than one language. Foreign languages are music to my ears. Consequently, some of my best friends were immigrants from Puerto Rico. We spent countless hours on school buses together and riding bikes and skateboards in their subdivision down the street from me. Their English was very good, so we had all our conversations in English, but I would often hear them converse amongst themselves in Spanish or with their parents or grandparents in their native tongue. I was jealous and wanted to crack the code.

My father is a physician and my mother a homemaker, which is at least equally as challenging considering the circumstances. She gave birth to 9 children and adopted two. She made sure we were where we were supposed to be each day and learning what we should be learning. Most of us were homeschooled by her at one point or another. One thing that my Mom and I had wished she had done for us kids, was to speak Spanish to us in our youth. I was jealous of my childhood friends who spoke Spanish at home and English at school. They seemed to have the edge or some sort of an advantage.

My favorite subject in school, obviously, was Spanish. I first started learning at age 5 or 6 in homeschool with my mom. I listened to lessons on cassette tapes (something like today’s audio files but archaic) and followed along with a thin workbook. As I got bigger, so did the workbooks and textbooks. I often went back and forth between public school and homeschool. In the public school, I would outperform all my peers. Students would ask me for help just to maintain a decent grade point average. But my motivation was different. I wanted to be bilingual.

One summer, during my high school years, I persuaded my parents to purchase the Spanish language learning version of Rosetta Stone. It is a software program that is comprised of 1000s of pictures and Spanish words and phrases to describe what the pictures are about (like a very long digital picture book with no real plot). A variety of