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 [...]
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 [...]
Storybird is such an amazing resource that it is hard to know where to begin to write about it. It is a collaborative storytelling site, designed to let children, or anyone, write art-inspired stories. The tremendous variety and excellent quality of the art make Storybird a wonderful tool for teaching and learning Spanish or any language. There are endless ways that the beautiful illustrations on this site can be used as a teaching tool. For [...]
I love the first days of class! It is exciting to be back, and it is an opportunity to get everyone off to a good start. Starting back, I try to use activities where kids are sharing information about themselves in Spanish. I create activities that use familiar vocabulary, have pictures, and are structured to let kids hear and then produce Spanish. Talking about things they like with gustar, kids can share personal information, either [...]
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 [...]
This song about summer is a good example of authentic language that can be used effectively with Spanish language learners. It is from Músicaeduca and they have lots of other resources to use with children of a variety of ages and language levels. Many thanks to them for permission to embed the video! The simple chorus of Verano y sol (Summer and Sun) can be used as a song in itself and has a lot [...]
This is a free book of fun and practical activities for teaching Spanish to children. ¡Aprendo jugando! Actividades de Español para niños y niñas de 6 a 9 años (I Learn by Playing! Spanish Activities for Boys and Girls from 6 to 9) is available to download in PDF format so that you can make copies of the activities and games. Teachers in Spain, with the support of the Spanish government, created the materials to [...]
One of the biggest challenges for Spanish teachers and parents teaching Spanish to their children is providing sufficient input at the appropriate level. Exposing a child to Spanish is not difficult, but exposing a child to Spanish at the right level and in a way that promotes learning is time consuming and a lot of work. Working with familiar information is one way to make the process easier. Children acquire language when there is comprehensible [...]
This printable book in Spanish has common vocabulary and a simple, repeated sentence structure. The title is El muñeco de nieve (The Snowman) and the story consists of showing the objects used to build a snowman and then the finished snowman. All of the sentences have the same pattern. This is the sentence from the first page: Esta es la nariz para el muñeco de nieve. (This is the nose for the snowman.) On [...]
Teaching my three children Spanish as they were growing up, I would not have predicted that the language would add so much to their relationship with each other. My daughters, Kate and Maggie, spent this summer together in Lima, Peru. Kate lives there, working as the Program Coordinator for Nexos Voluntarios. Maggie chose to spend the summer with her sister, working as an intern. I consider this somewhat of a sacrifice, because summer here corresponds [...]
The website Presencias de Música is a wonderful resource for anyone teaching Spanish to children. The site is maintained by a group of volunteers, under the direction and supervision of Prof. Pablo Bensaya of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The purpose of the site is to provide resources for music education to teachers in countries, or classes, where the first language is Spanish. However, the material that they have made available is also a resource to those [...]
This simple vocabulary activity is designed for native speakers who are beginning to read, but can also be used with Spanish language learners if you do it together and read the text aloud. Match the Spanish word to the picture. As you do the activity with your child, use the words in a sentence to give them context. For example: For the word nido – Hay pajaritos en el nido. For the word abeja – [...]