Teaching Spanish at Home

Have you entered my current giveaway?

Now if you have been following along for the past couple of weeks, you know I am involved in helping with the Little Pim Giveaway being run by Squishable Baby.  Part of my involvement is to also include a little about how I am going about teaching Spanish to Hazel.

Last spring we made the decision to switch schools for Hazel since we were having some issues with the discipline at her school. We moved her to a private Christian school that has a traditional curriculum. As part of a traditional curriculum she will be learning Latin. Now I do think knowing Latin can be helpful. I took a year of it in high school myself, but I also want her to have some experience with other languages (besides saying ciao to her Italian grandmother). I took Spanish from fifth grade until my junior year in high school and was in honors classes most of the time. However I have not spoken much Spanish since, so I need to relearn some. 

I know based on all the research out there, that now is the time to begin to teach her, so I am starting. I found some resources and have won some that we have been enjoying.

The first resource is a CD with book. It has songs that sings sayings in English and in Spanish. We often listen to this in the car. Hazel really enjoys it and is repeating some of the words. The next is a board book of Spanish numbers. It goes from 1 to 12 and then has 20, 50 and 100. Then it has adding and subtracting sentences in Spanish and English. We read this often at bedtime. She has started counting in Spanish, so it is working. The last two we have not spent much time with yet, but will be expanding our words with the dictionary and eventually she will not freak out that she does not understand the Spanish when I put on the DVD. Our only time watching it, she asked me to turn it off since she did not understand anything.

I also found some good resources at our local library. We are still exploring them and some are a bit ahead of Hazel's level, but we are working to it.

It is amazing what resources are out there. There are also some great ideas on many of the blogs I like to check out. 

• Spanish Playground
• Toddling in the Fastlane
• All Done Monkey

Needless to say I know I would find the Little Pim DVD series a huge aid in our lesson!! I hope you will come and enter the giveaway!!