This online Spanish game with native-speaker audio is a good way for children to practice vocabulary and listening comprehension while they are sorting, grouping and matching. Listening to native-speaker Spanish is also important for pronunciation. The set of activities is called Un poquito de orden and there are three temas (topics), each with several activities. Click on the link below to reach the online Spanish game. The site sometimes takes a little while to load. [...]
The Bilingual Baby DVD is a wonderful collection of images to support a voice-over narration of basic Spanish words and phrases. There is no story, but this DVD is surprisingly engaging and entertaining. The live action video of people and animals has wonderful colors and the pacing is just right. It holds a child’s attention and yet it is never too busy or overwhelming.
With these free printable pictures, kids find the differences and practice common Spanish words. These Spanish activities, Encuentra las diferencias, are from Minihogar Kids, the children’s section of El Minihogar. The puzzles are designed for native-speakers, so the solutions are in Spanish. Kids can use the words as they look for differences and then see the written Spanish words when they check their answers. There are three Hello Kitty scenes and two scenes with the [...]
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 [...]
Kids can learn lots of Spanish by measuring. I use measuring as an at-home activity with my students to practice vocabulary and numbers. In addition to the names of the objects they measure and the tools they use, kids learn words like ancho (width), largo (length), alto (height) and the verb medir (to measure). There are lots of online activities in Spanish to teach measuring that work well with children learning Spanish. This is a [...]
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 [...]
I was excited to see Juanita Ulloa’s name in my inbox recently. She wrote suggesting that Spanish Playground readers might be interested in her songs for children learning Spanish. Juanita Ulloa is one of the nation’s leading bilingual performers and songwriters. You can read more about her wonderful music on the Juanita Ulloa website. Juanita’s latest CD of music for children, ¡Canta mi son!, has won a National Association of Parenting Products Gold award and [...]
It is easy to talk about the calendar and the weather in Spanish with these colorful materials. They are provided by the Asociación mundial de educadores infantiles and they are all PDFs that you can download and print. There are signs with the Spanish months and the days of the week. There are numbers for the date, both day and year. There are also colorful signs for the seasons in Spanish. My favorite part of [...]
I use this simple game, He pensado un número, to review numbers in Spanish and teach mayor (greater) and menor (less). We play in class and I also give it to my students in their list of at-home activities. You can play with just two people or in a group. This game is played just like 20 questions. – One person chooses a number between 1 and 100. They can write it down or just [...]
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 1,2,3 Escondite inglés. If you know the game Red Light Green Light, this is basically played the same way. Children [...]
Los esqueletos, The Skeletons, is a great song for kids learning Spanish. It fits in well if you are doing anything related to El día de los muertos or Halloween, but it is also just a fun song to sing and teaches lots of language. When the clock strikes the different hours, skeletons come out of their graves and do all sorts of things. Kids learning Spanish get practice with the structure for telling time, [...]