I was excited to get this DVD in the mail from The Bilingual Fun Company. What great work Jennifer Manriquez and her husband Mark are doing teaching Spanish to children! This DVD, Volume 1 of Spanish for Children, is a wonderful place to start for parents and educators who want to expose children to the [...]
Mamá pájaro (Mama Bird) is a free printable mini-book, and it is excellent for speaking Spanish with your child. The book is short, with basic Spanish words and simple, common Spanish structures. The story lends itself well to follow-up activities, so it is easy to reinforce what your child is learning. This mini-book tells the [...]
This is fun and effective song for teaching Spanish to children. The tune and the actions make it fun. The actions and the association of related words make it a great learning tool. There is enough repetition that kids quickly learn the chorus and also enough variety to make the song interesting. Arriba, abajo is [...]
These online Spanish games involve matching simple text to the correct picture. You change objects in a scene to make them match a sentence in Spanish. The games are excellent for beginning Spanish readers and can also be used with children who don’t read if an adult reads the text aloud. In either case, the [...]
These photographs of houses are an excellent prompt for speaking Spanish with your child. The houses are so interesting! They are all very different. Some are whimsical, and others are elaborate or spooky. There are tree houses, rock houses and underground houses. The settings are impressive too, and they lend themselves to using lots of [...]
This weekend you may have celebrated Children’s Book Day. If you work with Spanish language learners, you may also want to recognize World Book Day, or El Día Internacional del Libro later in the month. This is a wonderful way to celebrate part of Spanish history and culture. UNESCO designated April 23 as a day [...]
Picture books in Spanish are one of the best language learning tools you can use with children. Even as kids get older, if you can convince them to listen or to read together, they will learn an amazing amount of Spanish. I love the Spanish-English bilingual book Un gato y un perro/A Cat and a [...]
This game, Pelota de ping pong (Ping pong ball), has a simple song in Spanish, lots of movement, and takes only a few minutes to play. Everyone sings the song the whole time, so there is lots of repetition. I have played this game with preschool and grade school groups and once I even played [...]
Letras de colores is a set of activities for native speakers who are learning to read and write. Two of the activities in particular are excellent for Spanish language learners because they are based on listening to native speaker audio. The first activity involves discriminating letter sounds and the second activity consists of ordering words [...]
I always like reading about the experiences of parents who are teaching their children Spanish. The blog at Bilingual Fun has some great articles about the joys and challenges of raising kids speaking two languages and how the process changes as they grow older. There are also recommendations for a variety of language learning products [...]
You can use El Señor Cara de Papa (or El Señor Cara de Patata, as he is known in Spain) to teach or reinforce vocabulary for the parts of the body in Spanish. This classic toy also works well for talking about colors. Try to use the words as you play without quizzing your child. [...]
Movement and music are valuable tools for teaching Spanish to children. Combining the two, children process the language at a deeper level and retain what they learn longer. Certain vocabulary, like parts of the body, lends itself to songs with actions. There are many Spanish versions of the classic Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes, but [...]
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