Do you have children starting Spanish in school? If you are looking for games and activities to supplement what they are doing in class, The Everything Kids’ First Spanish Puzzle and Activity Book has lots of fun ways to practice basic Spanish. Kids who like word games and activity books will love this book. It is packed with mazes, codes, word searches, hidden pictures and other puzzles that reinforce basic Spanish vocabulary and concepts. There [...]
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 language. Many of these activities with pictures are designed for beginning readers. They also work well with children who do [...]
El juego de Beenny (Beenny’s game) teaches children correct Spanish pronunciation, to read and write the sounds of Spanish, and lots of vocabulary. The game is from OnlineFreeSpanish and it is very entertaining! To play, kids guide a bee through a maze. Each time there is a frog blocking the path, the player writes a word by putting the letters in order. There is a picture of the word and a speaker to click to [...]
The Diccionario Multimedia is from the Portal de Educación – Junta de Castillo y León. It has common Spanish vocabulary for kids arranged by categories and represented by pictures. When children click on a picture, they hear the word pronounced in Spanish. There are also two games where they can practice the words that they have learned. Using the Diccionario Multimedia is good pronunciation practice, because children listen and repeat as they learn new Spanish [...]
A text-rich environment is very important for children learning Spanish. One of the difficulties of teaching Spanish as a minority language is that children are not exposed to the written language the way they constantly see signs, labels and advertisements in English. It is important to keep an interesting, changing flood of Spanish text at home and in classrooms. Here are 15 ways to create a world of Spanish words in your home. 1. Make [...]
This is a song with pictures, perfect for the very littlest children learning Spanish. Luna has the words luna (moon), sol (sun), caracol (snail), girasol (sunflower), ruiseñor (nightingale) and corazón (heart). The idea of labeling common objects to a familiar tune is one that you can easily adapt and use with your own pictures. The tune here is a variation of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. In general, words used in context are best for language [...]
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 the screen. I love how clear these sounds are and the combination of the scene and the sound create a [...]
The blog, Pequeños Artistas, Grandes Obras (Little Artists, Great Works), is the collaborative work of preschool and elementary teachers in Spain and Argentina. The site is a wonderful record of the art education they are doing in their classes, and it is also a great Spanish language resource. Several of the posts include comments from the students about paintings. The comments are funny and imaginative and hearing what Spanish-speaking children say about the pictures is [...]
Children play Frío o caliente in Spanish the same way they play Hot or Cold in English. There are just a few Spanish phrases to learn, and this game can easily be adapted to review Spanish vocabulary. It works well with just two or three children or a larger group. To play Frío o caliente, choose one person who will look for something. That person leaves the room, and the others hide a small object [...]
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 Dog by Claire Masurel. Although it is hard to define what exactly makes a picture book fun, in this case, [...]
This song uses the verb tener, and other useful verbs, in the first person. This verb form, the yo form, is one of the first children learn and it lets them talk about what they do. Through actions, the song also teaches a common meaning of así – “this way”, or “like this” – as the children show how big the house is, how the smoke comes out of the chimney, how they knock on [...]
The Spanish translation of The Napping House, La casa adormecida, it a great way to reinforce the verb hay (there is/there are). This is a wonderful translation by Alma Flor Ada. The repetition and the rhythm of the lines as something new is added with each page soon have children predicting and repeating the Spanish. Y en esa casa hay una cama… Y en esa cama hay una abuela… Y sobre esa abuela hay un [...]