Wrapping Up the Year with Reflections and Gratitude

I can never believe how fast the year goes by! As we prepare to take a short break at Vamos a Leer for the winter holidays, we thought we’d reflect on all the things that we’re thankful for here on the blog. For us, it’s been an amazing year as we’ve continued to develop and expand Vamos a Leer and our k-12 Outreach program. It’s been wonderful having Alice, Charla, Kalyn, and Logan join our blogging team. I love reading their posts each week. They’ve brought exciting ideas and new voices to Vamos a Leer. The best part is always getting to know all of you–the wonderful educators, librarians, administrators and readers who impact the students in our classrooms on a daily basis. Your jobs are not easy ones, and we truly appreciate everything that you do. Our hope here at Vamos a Leer is that through providing ideas and resources for authentic multicultural education we can make your jobs a little easier. And as always, we would love to hear your suggestions or ideas for things you’d like to see more of on the blog.

We’ve really loved seeing the #weneeddiversebooks movement continue to grow. It’s been great seeing so many of the Latin@ authors we know and love become increasingly accessible in classrooms and libraries. The conversations around the need for diversity in the literature and authors represented in schools and bookstores is such an important one, and we hope that it continues to become a frequent and commonplace discussion around the country. We will certainly continue to support this through our work here at Vamos a Leer and the Latin American and Iberian Institute. On a related note, we’ve got some really great titles coming up for our monthly book group. If you’re an Albuquerque local, we’d love to see you at one of our meetings. These continue to be one of my favorite parts of my job!

We hope you all have a restful and relaxing Winter Break. If you’re like us, and hope to get a chance to catch up on some reading, you may want to check out School Library Journal’s List of Top 10 Latin@ Books of 2015. It’s definitely worth looking at. We won’t be running out of good books to read anytime soon!

If you’re still looking for ideas to get you through these last few weeks of the semester, we’ve written posts with lots of different reading suggestions and activities perfect for this time of year. I’ve shared them below.