I have written about 9letras before, but with the school year starting I thought it would be a good idea to remind teachers and parents of this great resource. 9letras is a blog by Alberto Abarca Fillat of Huesca, Spain. Alberto shares educational material that he creates for teaching Spanish and his website has a huge number of printable activities for young Spanish learners. These are some of the features and pages that make 9letras [...]
School is starting soon for many of us, so I am passing on a couple of resources that might be helpful if you are looking for activities for the first few days. 1) This printable resource book has a variety of activities for the first days of school. It is made available to teachers by the Consejería de Educación of Andalucía and has material for all elementary school grades. The activities are designed to help [...]
This free iPad app from Ridili teaches a simple finger play. The traditional rhyme, originally in German, is called Plums Rhyme, or La rima aciruelada. The app gives you the rhyme in five languages – English, Spanish, French, German and Russian. For each, there is excellent audio, beautiful graphics and on-screen text. The Spanish version of the rhyme begins: Este es don señor pulgar. Él, las ciruelas cosecha. (This is Mister Thumb. He picks the [...]
Talk about this photo of kids on the first day of school to help your child learn Spanish. The questions that follow, like all the Learn Spanish with Pictures activities, are ordered to help children master the vocabulary and gain confidence with the language. Start with Describe the photo (1) and be sure to point to the objects in the picture as you talk about them. Use gestures, facial expressions and actions to help your [...]
Relajo en la cocina is a Mexican story that I read to my children when they were little. It is published by CONAFE (Consejo Nacional de Fometo Educativo) and is now available online in the Biblioteca Digital del ILCE (This is an amazing resource. If you have not checked it out, be sure to take a look). I loved reading this short, rhyming story with my kids and still use it with students. In terms [...]
This activity involves acting out a series of movements with prepositions, like encima de una silla or debajo de una mesa. The objects are imaginary in this game; we are just pretending to climb over a chair and go under a table. The game is quick, physical and I have used it with students of all ages to practice prepositions with other vocabulary. It works as well at home with one child as it does [...]
This Spanish song for kids, El telefonito, is by Yola Polastry. Yola is a very famous children’s performer from Peru. She had several popular television shows and her songs are considered children’s classics. The song is about the telephone and was written long before we all had cell phones. Kids still like it though and seem to relate to the bla, bla, bla of many phone calls. The song is mostly dialog and repeats several [...]
I have used activities with comic strips in Spanish and ESL classes with lots of success. Kids love them, and comics lend themselves to all kinds of language activities. Many of you are already familiar with MakeBeliefsComix.com, but if you have not taken a look, the website has a wonderful tool for letting kids create comic strips online. The comics they make can be printed or emailed. The site also has printable blank templates where [...]
Congratulations to Ashlee Resch and Maritza, the winners of this giveaway! I have two sets of Spanish activity books and picture books to give away to my readers. Each set contains two activity books (64 pages each) and five picture books. These are the materials in each giveaway: Cuaderno de vacaciones from Ingeniería Educativa – The giveaway includes two of these activity books (Preescolar 3 and Primaria 1). You can read the publisher’s description [...]
These online activities are provided by the Spanish publisher Editorial Teide as support for their textbooks. They are designed for children in Spain, but many of the activities are also appropriate for Spanish language learners. These activities for Primer Ciclo (6-8 years old) deal with basic concepts, vocabulary and language structures. Some of the games are very simple, for example, categorizing objects as duro or blando. Others, like Viviendas diferentes use more language and would [...]
Tesoros de lectura is a Spanish reading program from MacMillan/McGraw-Hill. It is the counterpart to the English program, Treasures. As a part of the program, the publisher makes available a variety of support materials for teachers and families. Specifically, there is a weekly letter with activities to send home. Although the activities are intended for classes using the Tesoros de lectura program, they provide excellent examples and are a wonderful resource for teachers and parents [...]
The website Aplicaciones Didácticas has a collection of short Spanish readings for children. The readings have comprehension questions that can be answered online, or you can print the reading and questions. The 40 Spanish readings are not arranged in order of length or difficulty. Some of them are very simple and appropriate for many language learners, so it is worth reading several to find the ones that work for you. There are a variety of [...]