In the Curriculum Meeting, the Board of Education were told that SFUSD has more students speaking Spanish in their homes-than any other language.

So I was delighted to see that el Dia de los Libros (the Day of Books) was going to be celebrated today at Dolores Park.

At Dolores Park, the children received “passports.” If they completed three art activities, they got a free book. The activities included creating a candy necklace, a paper sock puppet and milagro (cut-out designs on paper). The SF Children’s Art Center had a booth where the students could make (and take) a book.

This year, el Dia de Los Libros was sponsored by Childhood Matters Inc., Jump Start, SF Children’s Art Cener, Bay Area Discovery Museum, KQED, Mission Learning Center, Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, Our Family Coalition, Precita Eyes, SCRAP, SF Recreation and Park, Tree Frog Treks and ZEUM.

I went to El Dia de Los Libros to find out what Spanish-English books would be good for K-3 students. At John Muir Elementary School’s library, we are lacking books that would help early readers to decode words in English and Spanish. Since almost 50% of our students speak Spanish, this is a problem.

It appears that lacking bilingual books and instructional materials is a commonn program throughout the district.

At the BOE Curriculum meeting, Annette Lim of the District’s staff stated, “The state does not place the same priority in multilingualism as San Francisco.” So there is very little bilingual instructional material that has been approved by the state and thus very little instructional material gets printed.

As it turned out, all of the books that were in Spanish/English at the book booth at El Dia de Los Libros were for older students (3rd through 5th). The only books that were aimed at younger students were either all English or all Spanish.

I was directed to go to the Children’s Reading Room at the Mission Branch Library at 24th Avenue and Bartlett. I found that Mission Branch had only three shelves of bilingual books and they were not broken down into reading skill level. Most of the books were for older readers.

While I was looking through the bookshelves, one of the patrons came to see what I was doing. He was a student at Cesar Chavez Elementary and he was waiting for his time on the computer. He was a savvy library patron and knew all of the computer policies for Mission, Mission Bay, Excelsior, Bernal Heights and Main (”it’s the biggest library in the world!”)

He wants to be a Sports4Kid manager when he grows up. “Then I can play sports all day and get paid!” Sports4Kids is a paid program (usually by the PTA) that provides organized sports activities for students. My new Cesar Chavez ES friend also complained that there was only four more weeks of Sports4Kids-but (seeing the silver lining in the situation) he was happy that school would be out for the summer in six weeks.

His dream was to get a video game. And he would choose a video game that had math. “I love math. What’s 12 x 12?,” he asked. So together we calculated 12 x 12 on paper.

At that point, he was able to get onto the computer and do math games.

I only found five titles that would work for early readers. So I went to the Mission Branch Library’s children librarian. She gave me a reference of a Latin American children literature award and a list of those books that had won the award. Most of the books were for older readers and were only in Spanish.

So I will continue on my search for great K-3rd grade Spanish bilingual books. And my new found friend will continue to search for math games that he can play on our libraries’ computers.