The Baby Book Nook

Several of Eric Carle's board books are available in Spanish, including La oruga muy hambrienta (2002), the Spanish edition of The Very Hungry Caterpillar , and La oruga muy hambrienta/The Very Hungry Caterpillar (2011), a bilingual edition released in May of this year. The latter is available at the publisher's website . Are you raising a bilingual baby? In her recent post "Bilingual Babies: The Sooner, The Better," Ana Flores,  co-creater of the online resource SpanglishBaby , writes, "... the earlier we start exposing babies to a second language, the more flexible their bilingual brains will be and the more they can identify and separate the sounds of the different languages they are exposed to." La oruga muy hambrienta/The Very Hungry Caterpillar puts two languages on baby's plate. Yum!

A perfect pairing for 9- to 15-month-olds: The Very Hungry Caterpillar's Favorite Words (2007) and The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1994) 5 by 7 inch board edition. Both are written, designed, and illustrated by Eric Carle. The first is a small fistful of words, a 2 1/4 by 2 1/4 by 2 1/4 inch cube book. Ten words fill 20 THICK board pages. Pictures and verse are pulled from Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar : The small chunky serves as an appetizer for the famous main.  The plot of The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a bit beyond a 9-month-old's cognitive grasp, but the book as a w(hole) is not. Round cut-outs cue poking. A poke leads to a point. A point leads to a label. Labels lead to word learning.  Apples , pears , plums . ICE CREAM ! Center page widths vary, facilitating independent page turning. Read and reread Favorite Words before sharing the longer story. Your baby will build a picture and word bank to draw on, making the second book more digestible a...