Foreign Language trouble–The Easy Spanish?

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  • easybrizy
    Participant

    I’m embarrassed to admit that I had four semesters of college Spanish and don’t have much to show for it. Embarassed

    I loved the idea of introducing my children to Spanish and followed the advice of someone to use First Step Espanol. So, we sat down and watched a couple of the videos. And I tried to implement what we’d learned during our days, but I would forget, or feel a lack of direction, or…whatever.

    I like what Charlotte Mason has to say about foreign language–about it being better to acquire it naturally by hearing and speaking. Using little picture books or tapes, etc.

    But, I really feel like I need more specific guidance. I need someone to lay it all out for me in lesson plans and tell me exactly what to do! Ideally, we’d have a lovely friend who would come over and speak to us regularly in Spanish. (Actually, IDEALLY, I would have applied myself more in college and be able to speak it myself!) But in any case, we don’t have that.

    I’ve read some about The Easy Spanish and I’m considering using it for next year. My children are very young–they will be 6 1/2 and 4 next fall.

    Is The Easy Spanish a good program and would it work for kidlets so little?

    Linabean
    Participant

    Well, we use that program, but we are starting with the junior one and I am taking it very slowly because they do teach more than just a couple words or phrases in one day, which is my understanding of how CM says to do it. They have some notebooking activity options and other activity options that you can take or leave depending on how you want to use it. My 4dd is using it with us. She is getting some, she can tell me that she loves me in Spanish and that she is sad. This sort of tickles her pink and makes her want to try to act sad, though, just so she can say it! We listen to the stories and do the vocal drill at the end of each lesson and often we just listen to all of the stories that we have already listened to one right after the other for a review sort of thing or just do some of the vocal drills that they give that we have already done. I try to get them to focus on just one or two words at a time or just one phrase. We definitely stay on one lesson for a while before we attempt to move on. We also have a Spanish-English picture dictionary and sometimes we just each pick out a word from that and learn that one word each for that day or couple of days. But, I still feel as though it is somewhat slow going as we progress in our lessons. Need to spend more and more time on review because there are so many more lessons to review and so many more words in each lesson that we could concentrate on remembering etc.

    Well, I have no idea if that is clear as to how this program works, I just thought I would tell you what we do with it so that you would get a sense of how it CAN be used and that it is pretty flexible, IMHO.

    HTH,

    Miranda

    houseofchaos
    Participant

    The Easy Spanish is fun – we have gone through it once and the little ones picked up a fair bit of it.  It is meant to go through several times, with different activities for different age groups.  It is very flexible and I think it would work fine for your younger ones.  I haven’t seen the junior version, though. 

    You can order a sample disc from their website if you want to get a feel for it. 

    Gaeleen

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