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El sándwich de Carla, written by Debbie Herman and illustrated by Sheila Bailey

This story, originally published in English, is an entertaining story about Carla, a girl with an extremely unusual taste in food. Every day she brings a new creation to school and the other children all think she’s rather odd. That is, until one of them forgets to bring his lunch to school and well, let’s just say that hunger has a way of changing a child’s mind!

This week’s story is read by Beth Butler, creator and founder of the Boca Beth Spanish-English language learning system for children.

Beth, who previously lived in Chile and Mexico but currently lives in Tampa, Fla., spent 10 years in preschool and elementary school classrooms before creating her award-winning language learning program for parents and teachers educating bilingual children.

Research shows that adults don’t have to be bilingual or even proficient in a second language to introduce young children to a foreign language. And many of us already know how quickly little minds can soak up new words and then have their little mouths repeat those words when we’re least expecting it! That’s why the quality of input is so important.

The Boca Beth series of products, which include music, video, hand puppets and coloring books, are presented in a bilingual format with the English presented right alongside the Spanish.

“We teach to the whole child,” Beth says, “incorporating music for the auditory learner, DVDs for the visual learner, musical shakers and puppets for the kinesthetic/tactile learning and coloring/activity books for the beginning reading.”

¡Muchas gracias! to Beth for reading this story.

Learn more about Beth and the Boca Beth learning system here.

You can buy “El sándwich de Carla,” either in its Spanish or English versions, from Amazon.com.   (There is also a free “Carla’s Sandwich” activity guide on the Flashlight Press website for this book.) The book is very colorful with wonderful illustrations. It’s the kind of book that young readers would greatly enjoy having.