Monday, November 7, 2011

Meet the Collection Monday: Juvenile Spanish

I also get to take care of the Juvenile Spanish collection. There are 6 sub-collections within Juvenile Spanish: Board Books, Picture Books, Early Readers, Non-Fiction, Fiction, and Graphic Novels. The Juvenile Spanish collection is housed between the Picture Books and Early Readers in the Children's Room. All of our Spanish books have orange labels on them.



The collection is used by native Spanish speakers as well as native English speakers who want to learn Spanish. We have some books written entirely in Spanish, and some in both English and Spanish. The bilingual books are good for Spanish speakers trying to improve their English, and English speakers trying to improve their Spanish.


Board Books are specifically for babies and toddlers learning how books work. The Picture Books have a broad range of levels, anywhere from just a few words per page to several paragraphs per page. There are even a few Picture Books that include CDs along with them. Early Readers are great for native Spanish and native English speakers to learn how to read Spanish. The Non-Fiction section has a broad range of topics that can support kids in homework and is particularly good for parents whose primary language is Spanish who want to help their kids with their homework. Non-Fiction also has some high interest topics (vehicles, animals, biographies, fairy tales, etc). Fiction is made up of chapter books anywhere between 1st grade and 5th grade reading levels. Almost all of the chapter books are written in Spanish only. We have a very small, but hopefully growing section of graphic novels, or comics, shelved with the Fiction.






Many of the Spanish books are translations of popular books originally written in English (Harry Potter, Mo Willems, Dr. Seuss), but I also work hard on finding books that were originally written in Spanish. It is often hard to get Spanish translations, and they are often published way after the originals in English. Once in awhile, though, I can actually get a book in Spanish before it is published in English, like the Tunnels series, by Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams.




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