Educapeques is an educational portal with lots of resources for teachers and parents. On the website, Editorial Educapeques of Spain offers games, printables, stories and poems for children. Many of the activities and materials can be used with Spanish language learners. You will want to explore Educapeques to find what best fits your situation, but I will mention a few materials that work well with kids learning Spanish. Printable Spanish Games for Kids This printable [...]
I am going to be in Peru for the next few weeks and will not be posting as often on Spanish Playground. This seems like a good time to share some tips for finding for authentic language materials online. These suggestions are for Google searches, but you can apply them to other search engines as well. I know that many of you have more strategies for finding what you need – be sure to sure [...]
I write about lots of traditional playground games, hand-clapping games and jump rope rhymes that children play in Spanish. Recently Summer Nanny featured one of my articles in list of 20 blogs with playground games. A few of the games mentioned in the list lend themselves particularly well to language learning and I wanted to share five of them here. Check out Summer Nanny for more outside activities – everything from classic games to ways [...]
Sticky notes have to be one of the handiest inventions ever. In addition to keeping us organized, they are wonderful for language activities to teach kids Spanish. You can rearrange sticky notes, so they are perfect for matching activities. You can put them on a wall, so everything is bigger and kids can stand up and move. You can put them anywhere, so language can be applied to the physical world (I couldn’t resist the [...]
Tagxedo is an online tool for making word clouds in different shapes. It is a wonderful way to play with vocabulary related to a theme. There are animals, trees, flowers, and other common shapes. There are also shapes related to different holidays (a pumpkin, a bat and a witch, for example). You can experiment with design options like color, font, and text orientation, but all of the word clouds look good. This is the Tagxedo [...]
I love Letris and Words with Friends, but I have to admit that coloring is one of my favorite things to do on the iPad. It seems like magic! This free kid’s iPad app from OnlineFreeSpanish combines the wonder of coloring with your finger and native-speaker Spanish audio to teach the letters, letter sounds and vocabulary in Spanish. This app is free in the iTunes store. Spanish Alphabet Coloring has a page with a picture [...]
I have written about 9letras before, but with the school year starting I thought it would be a good idea to remind teachers and parents of this great resource. 9letras is a blog by Alberto Abarca Fillat of Huesca, Spain. Alberto shares educational material that he creates for teaching Spanish and his website has a huge number of printable activities for young Spanish learners. These are some of the features and pages that make 9letras [...]
This online game in Spanish teaches children about the five senses. La máquina de los sentidos is a game from Discovery Kids. It is designed to teach native Spanish speakers about taste, smell, sight, hearing and touch. It is an excellent game for Spanish language learners because – it has limited, focused vocabulary that is supported by images. – it is based on two question structures that are repeated over and over. – it has [...]
These photos of Olympic sports are a fun way to speak Spanish with kids. You can use them for activities like these: – Match the name of the sport to the photos. – Read the descriptions and find the picture that is being described. – Take turns describing a picture and guessing which picture is being described. – Teachers can project the pictures onto a whiteboard and use them as a tic-tac-toe board. Teams tell [...]
It is going fast, but there is still a lot of summer left to enjoy. Here is a list of activities to do during the remaining days of vacation and on into the fall. Kids can read the suggestions in Spanish, check off the activities they have done this summer and choose new ones to try. This Spanish list of activities is part of creating a print-rich environment for children learning the language. You will [...]
These photos of the American flag are a fun way to speak with Spanish with kids as the United States gets ready to celebrate Independence Day. You can use them for activities like these: – Read the descriptions and find the picture that is being described. – Take turns describing a picture and guessing which picture is being described. – Teachers can project the pictures onto a whiteboard and use them as a tic-tac-toe board. [...]
Help your child learn Spanish by talking about this picture of a man painting a picture. The questions that follow, like all the Learn Spanish with Pictures activities, are ordered to help children master the vocabulary and gain confidence with the language. Start with Describe the photo (1) and be sure to point to the objects in the picture as you talk about them. Use gestures, facial expressions and actions to help your child understand [...]