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 [...]
April is National Poetry Month in the United States. It is an excellent time to share poems in Spanish with children who are learning the language. Poetry does not have to be abstract or use figurative language, which can be hard in a second language. It can be clear, relate directly to kids’ experiences and use everyday words. In addition, carefully chosen poems let children experience the sound and rhythm of Spanish at the earliest [...]
April is National Poetry Month. Poems are a wonderful way for children to hear and speak Spanish and enjoy the rhythm and sounds of the language. Spanish language learners can read and listen to poems and with support they can also write their own. Here are a few ways to share poetry in Spanish with children during National Poetry Month. 17 Ideas for Sharing Spanish Poems with Kids 1. Watch videos of animated poems or [...]
¡Hola, Crayola! ¡Adios, carita de arroz! There are lots of Spanish rhymes like this, and kids like learning them because they are fun to say. They are some of the first spontaneous interactions in Spanish that I hear between students. Many of these Spanish rhymes are used to greet someone and are based on the word hola. Children say them with enthusiasm and affection. Other rhyming phrases are based on common expressions like bien dicho [...]
Poems in Spanish are a wonderful way for children to experience and learn the language. These three websites all have resources for reading and writing poems in Spanish with children in elementary school. The first two are PDFs that you can download and print, and the third is a website with many activities to use individually or in a poetry workshop. 1. El Rincón del Maestro is a site from Spain with materials for various [...]
Poems for children in Spanish teach language and culture through rhythm, rhyme and images. Simple structures and familiar vocabulary make these three poems easy to use with language learners. The online magazine, Cuatrogatos, is dedicated to children’s literature in Spanish. It is based in Miami and is an excellent resource for poetry to use with kids. The archives have material going back to 2000. Both Edgar Allan García of Ecuador and Sergio Andricaín of Cuba [...]
This free iPad app from Ridili teaches a simple finger play. The traditional rhyme, originally in German, is called Plums Rhyme, or La rima aciruelada. The app gives you the rhyme in five languages – English, Spanish, French, German and Russian. For each, there is excellent audio, beautiful graphics and on-screen text. The Spanish version of the rhyme begins: Este es don señor pulgar. Él, las ciruelas cosecha. (This is Mister Thumb. He picks the [...]
Reading El jardín de Douglas recently, I was happy to find two new poems that I think are especially well suited to using with Spanish language learners. I will share one today and the other one in the next few days. Douglas Wright is well-known poet, author and illustrator from Argentina. Finding his books in this country is not easy, but he generously shares his work on his blog El jardín de Douglas and also [...]
This is a traditional Spanish song for children. It compares a face to a house. The song has simple actions and uses lots of common vocabulary. You can make up any actions so that kids point to the body parts when they are mentioned. The ones I teach are a lot like the actions in the second video below, but I include the nose as the timbre (doorbell). My preschoolers can do the actions to [...]
Si yo pongo mis dos manos para arriba is a rhyme that children learn in preschool in Latin America. The actions perfectly reinforce the meaning of the words and it is an easy rhyme for little children to learn. This is an excellent video of the Spanish rhyme Si yo pongo. The images exactly correspond to the words and the audio is clear and slow. The words are on the screen, but I included them [...]
April is National Poetry Month and it is a wonderful time to share poetry with children. The rhyme and rhythm of poetry appeal to kids. They love to play with language and reading and listening to poems is a fun way to expose them to Spanish. One of my favorite poets for children learning Spanish is Douglas Wright, a well-known artist, poet and author from Argentina. He generously shares his work on his blog El [...]
Manzanita del Perú and En un café are traditional counting-out rhymes to start games. For both, kids usually count to ten, but sometimes they stop at three, since tres and diez rhyme. I have also seen Manzanita del Perú used as a jump rope rhyme. It has a great rhythm for jumping! Spanish rhymes like these are a good way for beginning learners to produce the language. Chanting a rhyme, kids will use vocabulary and [...]