I’m so happy to be a contributing writer for SpanglishBaby! If you aren’t familiar with the site, it is a wonderful resource for raising bilingual/bicultural children. My first article for them is about making and using story stones with children learning Spanish. You can find it here: Story Stones to Create and Inspire.
International Women’s Day is celebrated across the globe on March 8th. If you are talking about this day of recognition in your classes, here are a few resources that might be helpful. Much of this information can be used at anytime, not only for International Women’s Day. This is a set of educational resources from several different organizations: Día Internacional de la Mujer Across the top of the screen, you’ll see them listed: Propuestas didácticas [...]
Chillola is a website designed to let children explore different languages. The site has lots of basic Spanish vocabulary accompanied by images and native-speaker audio. It also has a variety of printable activities. The vocabulary is divided into categories including numbers, colors, shapes, school words, animals, fruit, vegetables, food, the calender, weather, time, house, vocabulary, prepositions, and opposites. The activities for several of the categories show one screen with pictures of all of the vocabulary [...]
This counting activity with Spanish audio is perfect for little ones. In Cuenta con Manitas children count the bees around a hive. It is part of the Manitas website that has a variety of games and activities for kids. Manitas is a children’s magazine published by the newspaper Prensa Libre of Guatemala. The Spanish audio in this counting game makes it a good language learning activity. Kids hear a short sentence and instructions in Spanish. [...]
You may have seen my posts about Nourish Interactive and their wonderful materials. It is a great bilingual website dedicated to supporting parents by providing them with useful information to help them improve their families health and educating children about the importance of nutrition and exercise. March is National Nutrition Month and Nourish Interactive has a campaign to help kids eat healthier and be healthier by making one simple pledge each week. This is a [...]
This set of Spanish St Patrick’s Day materials and activities is from the wonderful website Nourish Interactive. The free printable Spanish materials include coloring pages, word search puzzles, scrambled word puzzles, bookmarks, worksheets of words to alphabetize and lunchbox notes. All of these activities teach Spanish food vocabulary if you talk about them with kids learning Spanish, and of course they teach healthy eating habits! You can find all of these activities and others here: [...]
Salsa is an award-winning series of free Spanish videos produced by Georgia Public Broadcasting. The Spanish video lessons are designed for kindergartners through third grade. There are 42 video lessons and all of them are available to watch online. You can also purchase the videos to watch at home. Description of free Spanish videos These free Spanish videos combine puppets with live action footage and are very entertaining! They are all in Spanish and tell [...]
Online Free Spanish has added more syllable activities. This set uses the letter m plus the vowels: ma, me, mi, mo, mu. These activities are perfect for beginning Spanish readers and are also a good way to expose kids to new words. You can read more about why these activities work so well for children learning Spanish and find suggestions for additional activities using the printed pages here: Spanish syllable activities. These syllable activities have [...]
Children explore a city in this online game from the Venezuelan government. There are audio explanations of parts of the city and the text appears on the screen as children hear the words. The audio is very clear. The explanations are short, basic and use general words. Kids will be able to guess a lot of the vocabulary from context. This game is excellent listening practice. Children will not understand every word of the explanations, [...]
This is a set of Thanksgiving materials and activities in Spanish from the wonderful website Nourish Interactive. The free printable materials include coloring pages, word games, bookmarks, lunchbox notes, dinner place cards and a organization sheet to help with Thanksgiving planning. All of these activities teach Spanish food vocabulary and Thanksgiving vocabulary if you talk about them with kids learning Spanish. The following activities have simple text and work particularly well with Spanish language learners. [...]
This make-your-own online puppet show is a great way to get kids speaking Spanish or any language. Start by choosing scenery and characters. Then you can move the characters around and have them talk to each other. They automatically turn toward each other, and you can move them below the level of the stage. There are four scenes to choose from and four pairs of characters. This activity is on UpToTen – one of the [...]
Spanish in a Basket was such a treat to get in the mail! It is a lovely wicker picnic basket filled with bright, beautiful toys to help introduce children to Spanish. When I opened the basket, I found colorful wooden fruits and vegetables, hand-knit finger puppets, soft animal friends, and a bright table-setting. There were also 4 CDs and a DVD with 20 audio Spanish lessons for kids ages 3 to 8. Beth Manners, creator [...]