The traditional Spanish game, Debajo del puente (Under the Bridge), has several versions. It is a hand-clapping game and is also used as a jump-rope rhyme. The hand-clapping game ends with the kids freezing in place and trying not to laugh or move. As the words indicate, the first one who moves gets a pinch. [...]
It is fall, and in Wisconsin we have calabazas, or pumpkins, everywhere! 1,2,3 Calabaza is a traditional game children play in Mexico. It is a good game for even the youngest children learning Spanish. I do not know if it is played in other Latin American countries or not, but in Spain it is called [...]
9letras is the blog of Alberto Abarca Fillat of Huesca, Spain. Alberto shares educational material for teaching Spanish and the website has an impressive number of printable activities for young Spanish language learners. All of the material is created by the author, and lots of the activities have pictures to help Spanish learners interpret the [...]
I am always on the look out for pictures to use to teach Spanish to children. Ideally, the pictures are scenes of common situations with several people. They need to have enough detail to provide a context for what we say and to help kids practice common Spanish vocabulary and different structures. It is great [...]
What a fun way to review basic vocabulary in Spanish! This video is by a speech and language therapist in Spain. Children see a scene and then hear the sound of something in the picture. They identify what makes that noise. After a moment, a picture of the object and the Spanish word come on [...]
I am a big fan of mini-books, so I was happy to see that OnlineFreeSpanish.com has added a selection of bilingual mini-books to their website. I was even happier when I saw that these books include online Spanish audio! Printable mini-books let kids make the language their own. They can color the pictures, read the [...]
I have a great time playing toma todo, or pirinola, with children learning Spanish. The phrases are simple and practical, and kids love spinning the top. My kids grew up playing at home and in Mexico, where the six-sided top is a pirinola. In some countries it is a perinola. We get wooden tops in [...]
Hand clapping games are a good way to engage children actively with the Spanish language. Por aquí pasó un caballo is a traditional hand clapping game that begins with a simple rhyme and ends with counting to 16. Estaba la Catalina is a song and hand clapping game that tells the story of a woman [...]
Hand clapping games are great Spanish language activities for children. These two games are each based on just one word, so they are simple to learn. One is Chocolate and the other is Mariposa (butterfly). They are both excellent for practicing correct Spanish pronunciation. The games break the word into syllables and put it together [...]
Mi mundo en palabras is part of the Centro Virtual Cervantes, a site created by the Instituto Cervantes of Spain. It is a wonderful interactive site designed to teach children Spanish. The target audience is seven to nine-year-olds, that is, children who can read and write. However, many of the activities can be used by [...]
My son Andrew is 23 and he just got back from visiting my daughter, Kate, in Lima, Peru. He was telling me about being there and about arm wrestling with Kate’s boyfriend. Listening to him, for a moment I saw the eight-year-old Andrew, arm wrestling with his friends in Mexico, the whole group cheering and [...]
Children naturally play with language, experimenting with rhyme and rhythm. In English, they say “See ya later, alligator” and “After a while, crocodile”. They also make up rhymes and sayings with their friends. The expressions are often nonsense. Children say them for the sound of the language. There are lots of expressions like these in [...]
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