The weekly bilingual story hour often draws 25 families, she says. Usually about one-third of those families are not native-Spanish speakers. A few, she surmises, are headed by parents who don't speak Spanish at all but who are trying to expose their children to a second language. Even if you don't have a second language yourself, librarians can help you find tapes of songs and stories and help you give your toddlers a start on being bilingual.

At Salt Lake's Day-Riverside Library, the bilingual story hour brings out children as old as 12, says library assistant Gracie Mora. She encourages older children to read to the younger ones, always choosing a native-English speaker to read the Spanish paragraphs and a native-Spanish speaker to read in English.

Mora herself learned English by immersion. When she was 10, her family moved from Mexico to Texas and she went to fourth grade with a teacher who understood her Spanish but who spoke only English back to her. By fifth grade, Mora knew English.

So when it came to raising her own children, Mora did not hesitate to immerse them in two languages at once. She spoke to them in Spanish for a time each day, and then in English. If she was talking to them about something important, she would say it twice, once in each language. She didn't want them to use their favorite excuse for not doing what she asked, i.e. "You said it in English and I didn't understand," or "You said it in Spanish and I didn't understand."

As for Sabrina McKee, she wonders if children start to rebel a bit once they get into public school and realize that other children are speaking English at home. She can't exactly remember preferring to speak English to her father, but she thinks she may have gone through such a phase.

Meanwhile, for the children who have been through her preschool and who do want to keep up on their Spanish, McKee offers after-school programs as well as a summer school. This summer her classes contain older children who are fluent in Spanish, as well as a couple of preschoolers who had never heard a word of Spanish until they came through her door and were no longer allowed to speak a word of English.

One recent afternoon it was possible to observe a little boy who had been at the McKee school for only two days. He sat at a table with five or six other preschoolers, cutting out a paper star. "Is this a star," his teacher asked him, in Spanish, trying to get him to say a complete sentence. The other children all answered "Yes, this is a star," but the most she could get from the new fellow was, "Si."

Still, it was impressive that he seemed to know what she was asking and knew that "yes" was the correct answer to her question.

Later, the teacher got out a huge bin of Legos. She passed out the blocks to children who asked for them correctly. "I want three small yellow blocks," said one boy, in Spanish. "I want two big green ones," said another.

When it was the new boy's turn to ask for blocks, he did amazingly well, asking for a big red and also a big blue. He seemed proud after the teacher passed him the blocks he'd asked for.

Yet he didn't seem proud because he was learning a new language, necessarily. Spanish seemed to be just a part of this place to him. Rather he seemed proud because he liked what he was building. After he added the rojo and azul to his stack of blocks, he held out his Lego tower, so that the other children could admire it.

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E-mail: susan@desnews.com