Spanish Lessons: What I'm Doing

So after a few weeks of plugging away at guiding my little ones in their foreign language journey, I realize that I am finally starting to find my groove. Finally. I am adhering, for the most part, to Charlotte Mason's recommendation of short lessons...10 to 15 minutes. I love that I don't have to come up with a 45 minute "show" every day like I did back when I taught in the public school. It is freeing only to be responsible for a quick lesson in the target language. And the kids are actively involved and engaged. 


My general outline:

Day 1 - review previous vocabulary and introduce new words. Play around with the words actively, using puppets or physical activity or just good ol' simple conversation/Q&A in the target language.

Day 2 - 

watch a Salsa episode online (the previous day's introduction to vocabulary is a help). By the way, this is a free online Spanish video program, a PBS production out of Georgia. It is really captivating to young learners! Each episode is about 15 minutes and uses only Spanish.

Day 3 - 

review new words again. Listen to/learn a song or finger rhyme. I am using Jose Luis Orozco's compilations taken from either Diez Deditos or De Colores and Other Latin American Folk Songs for Children. I also bought the CD that goes alongside this book. After watching the Salsa episode, I can usually find a Finger Rhyme or song that reinforces something in the video. If not, I will look up children's songs on YouTube for ideas or teach a Christian praise song or children's song.

Day 4 - review words and song/rhyme. Play a game, which may include Bingo or Find It or Charades, among several other options.

Day 5 - review and read a book that relates to the "theme" of the week. I was fortunate enough to be gifted quite a substantial starter library of Spanish children's books. Granted, many of them are still too advanced regarding the amount of unknown words; however, I feel that my kids can get something out of it by following along with the pictures, the inflections in my voice and the new words we covered during the week. I also believe it is a good opportunity to just hear more of the language in use. This, along with the videos, will help keep their ears attuned to the sounds of the Spanish language.


If interested, here is a sample week's plan I have used recently:

Due to the context of the Salsa episode being about Little Red Riding-Hood (episode 107), I chose to acquaint my children with the original version of this fairy tale. Thus:

Day 1 - The Blue Fairy Book (by Andrew Lang): Little Red Riding-Hood (spoiler alert: the ending is a sad one!) 

Depiction by Gustave Doré

My 6yo son was surprised, but he still enjoyed it... so much so that for his Copywork, I had him write a letter to his daddy about it and use the last bit of the story for a separate Copywork assignment.

Day 2 - Salsa, episode 107

Day 3 - Diez Deditos finger rhyme: Mi familia. Then we proceeded to look at pictures of our family and extended family to identify them in Spanish (such as abuelo, abuela, tío, tía, etc.)

Day 4 - Review rhyme and family members, questioning more. ¿Quién es ella? ¿Quién es él? (helping them to answer in complete sentences: Es mi abuela. Es mi tío.) A fun activity after this is to have small, printed face shots of each family member for them to glue onto a family tree worksheet, then talk about them in Spanish...perhaps to Daddy or another relative or friend?

Day 5 - Read Caperucita Roja. Of course this version is different than the original, but the kids at least knew the basic plot of the tale and thoroughly enjoyed it!

My Spanish language ponderings

Something I have been concerned about for a good while is teaching my children Spanish. I am a regular gringa (white girl) who grew up in Texas, but with a love for foreign language (especially Spanish). A childhood friend of mine, an Argentine that I played with regularly for the year while her father was stationed in Texas, was my first exposure to Spanish. She spoke no English then. We were both 4 years old. I am convinced this was critical in my formative years for language acquisition. 

Jump ahead 12 years to high school where I took my first formal Spanish classes. (That’s a LOT of good learning years I missed out on!) After these 2 years of introductory Spanish, I could give a laundry list of other classes and opportunities I had that helped in my fluency and comfort in speaking the language well; however, the fact of the matter remains that I was an adult before I was able to finally consider myself fluent.  I don’t want this for my little ones! And now that I am homeschooling, I have the say-so (and the wonderful gift of wherewithal) in educating my children to the best of my ability and to their benefit. I am still trying to figure out how to help my little gringo children learn (and love!) to speak a foreign language… In future reflections I hope to record how this journey is progressing.

Spanish Immersion, Morning 1

Today I started "Spanish ONLY" ... up until lunch anyway. 

During weekdays my kids (4 & 2) have "preschool" with a Peruvian gal, K, who comes to our house and plays with them and does learning activities while Hubby and I do ministry projects. She mostly speaks to them in Spanish, but sometimes my 4yo gets frustrated because he doesn't understand, so she'll give him a break and speak to him in English. Now that we're getting closer and closer to our departure from Peru, I'm wanting to start implementing more Spanish into our home life, so I spoke with K about working with me on this. I told her that even Hubby & I will be using Spanish with the kids in the AM in order to make it only Spanish across the board. I've explained this change to my 4yo so he won't be caught off-guard. My 2yo is much more go-with-the-flow. It seems she doesn't even realize there's a difference between me speaking Spanish or English to her. She responds equally and never shows frustration.

Well so I got up this morning to a bare-bottomed Cutlet telling me he'd peed the bed (which he rarely does anymore!) ... and THIS is how I'm gonna start our first Spanish only morning??? So I didn't say anything... just got up and went to take a look at the damage. I finally just picked him up and sat him on my lap and reminded him that we were gonna be speaking Spanish today. After that, I mustered up my gumption and just started in, albeit somewhat timidly... Although it was after 7AM and K would be here around 8, he wanted to lay back down for a bit, so I changed his pajamas and, to curb the crankiness he was emitting, I relented to his wishes. I didn't want his morning to be more difficult than it was already starting out to be. About 5-10 minutes later, he gets up happily and is ready to put his regular clothes on. Yay!


Well I think the morning went quite well. No fusses from Cutlet about me speaking Spanish... and definitely no attitude from Lively... she takes things in stride. I have to say that at this point I am very glad I've got K coming every weekday morning because I really don't know how I could handle 4-5 hours of only Spanish with my sweet little ones. I did notice that as I was in and out of the house during the morning, speaking Spanish to them just felt "strange". Hubby had the same sentiments. How can we do this?!? English is how we can best express our feelings and love and silliness with them! Honestly we missed that closeness. I don't want to give up yet though because this trial deserves a good test run... and I hear that it starts feeling more "normal" as days go by...

Spanish... "Naturally"

As mentioned under the 'My Family' tab, we are moving back to the USA in December... and although we are not officially homeschooling yet, I feel it is my duty (and would be a disservice otherwise) to make sure my 2 wee ones continue to be surrounded with the Spanish language. Up until now, I've just let the kids take in the language outside of our home by native speakers; however, it's about time for me to step up to the plate and take charge of this area myself. And although I've been exposed to, formally studied or have taught the Spanish language for around half of my life (!!!), I still have doubts about how effective I can be in successfully transferring this knowledge to my two little ones because I am not a native speaker... Get a grip, right?!?

OK, so I'm the kind of person who takes her time in making decisions and if I'm going to do something, I want to do a good job. I also need to have a plan (at least to get me started... then I can change things up a bit once I get going and see how things work in real life!) So I've done some searches on Amazon and ebay for Spanish resources to incorporate into our home education in the near future... books, poems, nursery rhymes, folk songs...

Also I've been doing a bit of Q&A with some folks online to gain some insight into how they go about teaching a foreign language in a natural context, no curriculum. I used the Discussion Forum at Simply Charlotte Mason (SCM) and posed this question. I got some really helpful responses. Thanks to Richele at Barefoot Voyage for a glimpse into her life, teaching her boys Russian as a non-native speaker. She schools in English until around noon, then the rest of the day primarily uses Russian. In addition, she incorporates Russian folktales, cartoons, audio stories and music throughout their daily life.

Another SCM member known as missingtheshire has taught her daughters German as a non-native speaker. They are now in high school and using a German curriculum, but when they were small, she just used everyday conversation with them and taught them the names of common objects in the house. Once they could read, she labeled items all over the house for them to see. In addition, she reminded me that finding someone to practice with (for myself as well as for them!) is a great supplement to keeping language skills honed.

I have also conversed a little bit with Silvia at Homeschooling in a Bilingual Home . Silvia, who is Spanish, told me from her own experience:

My daughters didn't speak much Spanish two years ago (and they are now six and almost four). I was devastated because when we went to Spain last time my oldest, four at the time, didn't have much Spanish, the little one had some words in Spanish and a great vocabulary at two. But now they seem to be flourishing in Spanish...

Silvia speaks to her girls in Spanish most of the day and incorporates additional opportunities to interact with each other, such as reading and hanging out with other Spanish-speaking families. She admits though, that oftentimes their homeschooling sessions are a mixture of both languages and that is totally fine. She knows that as they continue to grow and learn together, the girls will eventually be equally as strong in Spanish as in English.
 
Amy at Fisher Academy International Teaching Home has also been helpful in giving me her two-cents on the matter, as she's quite a seasoned missionary in Peru with 5 kids who are also acquiring Spanish as they all minister to and fellowship with Spanish-speakers. She states:

We'd been here for several years and [my kids'] Spanish was really quite sketchy.  Even though they heard it spoken, they would not speak (couldn't really). ... Honestly, my kids didn't hardly learn a speck of Spanish until they had Spanish speaking friends.  

In addition to echoing what others have already mentioned, Amy also tells me that they have family Bible time (in Spanish) together in the mornings, and afterward each child takes a turn in narrating back in Spanish! Of course this requires a greater command of the spoken language, but what a great goal!


Just recently I've come across another blog dedicated to bilingualism: MommyMaestra. The blog author, Monica, is a Latina homeschooler and has lots of great resources and links to other useful sites and blogs as well. Through her blog I found the Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism hosted by Letizia, an Italian, at Bilingual for Fun, which led me to realize just how many other moms and dads are dedicated to bringing up their children bilingually. 

In fact, just recently I encountered a gringo (white) family here on a 5-month teaching assignment. The husband grew up speaking Spanish since about the age of 5, and after he and his wife had their first child (now 5), he began only speaking Spanish to her. Now they have a son (2) and speaking Spanish to his children is automatic now after these 5 years. This is another motivator to me that in order for bilingualism to occur, I've got to get over the hump of that "unnatural" feeling, and after a few days/weeks/months, it will come to feel more natural that I speak Spanish with my children. (the habit of discipline on my part!)

So I wanted to share a really cool contribution by Letizia, entitled 8 reasons why you don’t have to be a native speaker to teach your child a language. Wow! This is the shot in the arm I was needing! Below are highlighted those 8 reasons she mentioned. You can go over to her blog to read up on the elaboration of those reasons if this piques your interest a bit :-)

1. Language is a living organism
2. There's not such a thing as a pure accent
3. Languages are a tool to communicate
4. You can and should provide multiple input for the second language
5. Children have an impressive ability to incorporate input from different sources
6. This might be the only chance at hand
7. Whatever your knowledge of the second language you can find the right approach for you and your family
8. If you really want it, you'll make it

 And so, although I've still got a few reservations as to how effective I can be, I'm more determined to face my fears head-on. I am also more aware now that there is a very experienced (and LARGE) community of dedicated parents in the world who are committed to the task of interacting with their children in a foreign language on a daily basis. Thank you to the select few that I've happened upon. You've been an inspiration!