I am so excited! After being inspired by this website, and doing a little research on the internet, I set some goals to help facilitate an environment in our home for learning Spanish. My husband, who also speaks Spanish as a second language, is supportive and excited to get going on this, too.
My four goals are:
1. Speak only Spanish on Sundays & Tuesdays; Be happy with our best even if it's not perfect
2. Have a 15-30 minute Spanish session everyday with my kids
3. Incorporate more Spanish music, books & videos into our lives
4. Seek out playdates with other bilingual children
So yesterday we spoke Spanish all day (more or less) and our boys thought it was pretty cool, even if they couldn't understand much of what we were saying. Hopefully that will get easier.
Today, I reserved a corner in our family room for a "Spanish corner" and set out a quilt and some Spanish books. Then I invited my boys to come take a trip with me to Mexico. We pretended like we were putting on our seatbelts and flying through the air and then arrived in Mexico. I transitioned from English to Spanish (though I stopped to explain words every now and then in English). We sang a song in Spanish from Primary that they had heard before in both languages. Then I read a Spanish book we have about Curious George (Jorge el Curioso). They were still having fun so then I transitioned into our little lesson on colors. I had construction papers in red, blue, yellow, orange and green and we echoed back and forth the names, talked about our favorites and ones we didn't like and pointed to different things around the room in those colors, all the while repeating the color names as many times as possible. Then we played Candyland, speaking all in Spanish. It worked really great! We sang one more Spanish song that I got from the book "De Colores and other Latin-American Folk Songs for Children" by Jose-Luis Orozco. (This is a great songbook!) We sang Buenos Dias set to the tune of Frere Jacques and is great because you can echo it back and forth while learning basic Spanish phrases. Finally, I gave them a picture to color and we got back on the airplane. My son was the pilot this time and we landed back in Texas safely without too many fighting or frustrated words.
I'm so pumped to do this again! They had fun and I had fun and I know they learned a thing or two!
This is wonderful! I'm so excited for you to do this. I love your goals! About a year and a half ago I visited my sister in France. Her kids were speaking in French so well because they went to a French-speaking school. This made me set new goals because I wanted my kids to speak a foreign language like that. It was hard at times to stick with it, but it's so fun! My two year old started throwing more tantrums on days we spoke Spanish, but after about 3 weeks, she stopped throwing fits and understands everything I say now. Good luck! Sounds like a great activity!!
ReplyDeleteWow, this is so inspiring. I love all your fun ideas. I especially love that it's all a GAME (surely one of the greatest teaching tools for children, right?). I need to come back here often to get some weekly/daily motivation for my Spanish efforts!
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