Juegos para los colores

This site has some fun games for learning colors and other Spanish vocab. My boys always love anything that remotely resembles a video game so they enjoyed them and I think learned a thing or two at the same time!

Semillitas de aprendizaje

Update on our Spanish speaking days

I'm not perfect.

In the past I would get so frustrated if I didn't speak every word of the day in Spanish on our Spanish Only Days. I felt like if I wasn't perfect in my Spanish then somehow I would completely confuse my children and ruin their chance to ever learn Spanish. I had an all or nothing attitude and this frustration only led to giving up.

This time around I've taken the attitude that something is better than nothing. I may not be able to communicate everything in Spanish. And I often feel like I'm hardly speaking any on our Spanish only days because my five year old is constantly asking questions and wanting me to explain things in terms he can understand or because I get lazy and want to communicate something right away. But atleast I am trying to speak as much as I can. And there are vocabulary words that they are learning and hearing over and over again.

Maybe I've got it all wrong entirely. But above all, I want this to be a positive experience, for my boys to love the Spanish language as much as I do. If nothing else, I feel that perhaps I'm making it easier for them to one day learn to speak fluently, even if that's not right now.

After we'd been going a few days, my three year old asked me to stop speaking in Spanish. My five year old got upset and said, "No! I want to learn to speak Spanish!" I say that's progress!

Excited about Castellano

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!

Teaching Colors in a Foreign Language

I thought this was a good article:
http://languagestudy.suite101.com/article.cfm/foreign_language_color_games

Spanglish

My husband and I both served as missionaries in foreign countries- Spain and Argentina and we love the Spanish language. We have always wanted to maintain our Spanish skills after all the work it took to learn a second language and to teach our children Spanish from a young age. We started out doing great with our first child. We only spoke Spanish at home until our son was about 6 months old. Then we moved in with family while my husband was looking for his first job and things got a bit complicated. Once on our own we tried again except going a week at a time speaking only Spanish and then a week of English. It was exciting to see how much our son was picking up and many of his first words were Spanish- luz, aqua, etc. Then the terrible twos set in and then we had a second child and it got too hard and unfortunately, I gave up.
Lately our boys have taken an interest in learning more Spanish words, asking us how to say things in Spanish and how to count. Today, I discovered a great blog off of another friend's blog called Wanna Jugar with Migo? http://wannajugarwithmigo.blogspot.com/ and it's inpsired me to try again! I plan on doing this activity on Monday: http://wannajugarwithmigo.blogspot.com/2009/03/juego-del-jueves-voy-de-viaje.html So thanks, Tati, for your inspiration!
(They also have great giveaways!)