Spanish Immersion Trip to Punta Cana: What My Family Learned

As a fully bilingual Latina raising multicultural kids, I have always envisioned myself passing down the Spanish language to them. Since their infancy, I have made an effort to buy bilingual books, play Latin music, and teach Spanish sight words to my children. Despite this, my two kids, ages 4 and 8, are still primarily English-dominant.

I’ve had guilt over this since the ‘one-person, one-language’ method just didn’t work for us. Teaching children to be bilingual can be difficult, and I have to remind myself that I grew up in a Spanish-dominant household while our family now mainly communicates in English. 

I’ve had to think of more creative ways to get them excited about learning the language. Earlier this year we decided to take a Spanish immersion trip to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic. We stayed at the Lopesan Costa Bávaro, a 5-star, all-inclusive hotel to make travel and family activities a lot easier.

We really enjoyed the space, which included a splash park, kiddie pools, an indoor play place, an arcade, and the beach–of course. The hotel also included five restaurants, including one that served traditional Dominican cuisine. 

To me, language is about more than just the words themselves; I want to teach them to value the world and its many cultures. So the goal of the trip was to primarily speak to my kids in Spanish and offer them an enriching travel experience. I blocked out two to three hour windows to speak to them only in Spanish each day and found that they became curious about the language and kept asking me how to translate words, even when we weren’t in practice mode. 

One of their favorite spots in the hotel was the ice cream shop. The kids learned what to call the sweet treat in Spanish (helado) and asked how to say the different ice cream flavors in Spanish too. The most important part of the immersion trip was to have fun and to set realistic expectations about their language development journey. 

My kids weren’t going to leave the trip being fully bilingual, but the goal was to spark their interest and create a positive learning experience. For me, it was also a reminder to let go of the bilingual parenting pressure I constantly put on myself. So much of passing down a language requires planning and consistency, which can be hard to keep up with at times—and that’s OK. 

Once we got home, my son asked us to download the app Duolingo on our devices so he could continue practicing his Spanish. And I still make it a point to occasionally shift to Spanish and teach them new words: little by little, poco a poco.