So, how do you incorporate Spanish conversation into your day?

[Hillary in KS]

I do speak Spanish, but my dh does not. My eldest son has been doing Rosetta Stone for a couple of years, but was frustrated because he couldn't really "converse" with anyone.

 

Recently I purchased "So You Really Want to Learn Spanish" by Galore Park. Ds likes that it immediately got him talking, started with helpful conversation pieces, and focuses on grammar.

 

BUT, I realize that we'll all need more conversation practice. My two younger dc (7 and 4) want to learn too, but wouldn't be able to work in the text, obviously. They'd have to pick things up verbally.

 

So how do you successfully do this, especially with littles?

 

Thanks!

 

Hillary

[Begonia]

Dd and I have little conversations in Spanish occasionally when we're in the car or at the grocery shop. It's our "secret" language (dh speaks French and older dd studied Latin and Greek). Every now and then I ask her to make up a story (she's a great story-teller) in Spanish. I give her the parameters and she takes off from there. A couple of days ago, for example, I told her that she had to pretend to be the owner of a zoo and that she had to write an advertisement in Spanish telling people about some of the animals. She spoke in Spanish for about half an hour about the shy lion who was secretly in love with the giraffe next door, the hungry snake who really wanted to have legs so that she could walk to the bird cage and have eggs for breakfast, etc. It was fun and she got to use much of her Span I vocabulary.

 

My only worry is that she doesn't have the opportunity to converse with other Spanish speakers. It's one thing to have chats in elementary Spanish with one's mom and quite another to keep up a conversation with native speakers. I'm going to have to try harder to provide her those opportunities.

[Harriet Vane]

My dh can speak Spanish. He makes a point of practicing with the kids at least a couple nights a week as well as in the morning. Most of his conversation with them is centered around setting the table :rolleyes: but they also practice whatever is current from their Spanish class. Sometimes if my dh has gotten some Spanish children's books from the library they might read together. My dd *loves* Mafalda.

 

My kids also have a weekly Spanish class with a wonderful Spanish teacher.

 

Once a week I babysit a friend's kid while she exercises; in return she chats in Spanish with my dd. Often they simply play board games or cards or read Spanish children's literature.

[Guest rBilingualJourney]

My husband and I speak English and we don't come from Spanish-speaking families. But from the time our first daughter was conceived we knew that raising her to be bilingual would be a good thing.

 

What works well for our family is having Spanish Time--a special time each day where we learn and speak Spanish to each other. I try to make the activities active and fun.

 

Having Spanish Time is good for us because it takes the edge off of my husband and me to speak Spanish to them all day. And what we talk about and learn for the week is built around a specific topic or theme.

 

The kids really look forward to Spanish Time.

 

We try to expose them to as much Spanish as possible outside of Spanish Time too through kid shows and musica.

[Harriet Vane]

He is likely to break into Spanish at any moment, and he expects the kids to respond in kind.

 

He most commonly speaks Spanish with them when they are all working in the kitchen, so they have kitchen-related vocabulary memorized pretty well. :)

 

One of the easiest ways to incorporate Spanish is to attach it to a mealtime and require only Spanish to be spoken at that time.

[genestaz]

Honestly, I don't know what would work with older kids but little ones learn Spanish the exact same way they learn English, by consistently hearing it all the time. I don't really think that having a Spanish hour would work if what you want to achieve is fluency. My own trilingual children associate languages with people. I speak Spanish to mom and dad, I speak Farsi to my grandma, aunts and uncles, I speak Spanish to my teacher and my friends at school, I speak English to my other grandparents and my other aunts and uncles, I speak English to the kids on the playground, I speak Spanish to daddy's coworkers, etc etc. The only people they'll speak different languages with are each other and they'll usually choose which language to speak amongst each other based on which adults are around and what their primary language is. When I've tried, on occasion, to mix up the languages (ie: try to incorporate the few Farsi phrases I know or speak to them in English in order to avoid leaving English speakers out of the conversation) the kids get annoyed (NO MOMMY, HABLAME EN ESPANOL!) This has honestly been a problem as we've started reading lessons since nobody in the house speaks English to the kids and we've decided to do reading in English first. After my son understood WHY we wanted him to learn how to read in English first (because all the street signs are in English, the recipes to make his favorite cookies are in English, etc.) he agreed to learn in English. But he still insists that I provide explanations in Spanish (ABCs en ingles pero lo demas en espanol, por favor) If one person consistently speaks to them in Spanish and ONLY Spanish, they WILL learn. At my son's bilingual preschool the teachers speak only Spanish and every single child in the class, even those who never heard Spanish before, could understand everything that happened in the class within a few months. So with your little one I would simply start refusing to speak in English to them at all. If you only speak in Spanish then they will figure it out soon enough. I don't know if the same technique would work with older kids. When my adolescent brothers visit for the summers we continue speaking mostly Spanish at home and they just get annoyed and keep asking for translations. My 14 year old brother is downright hostile about it and insists that "This is America. Speak English!" Now, the problems with THAT attitude are numerous but since I don't see them that much it's not really worth arguing about so I just translate a lot when he's around.

 

Hope this helps!

 

Genesta

[genestaz]

Also, I should probably mention that Spanish is not my native language. I spent a semester abroad in Ecuador in college and completed a Spanish minor. I do live in a community with a lot of Spanish speakers and our business caters to the Spanish speaking community so I have a number of opportunities to practice at work. Still, speaking Spanish full time to the kids means communicating at home in a language that I'm less than 100% fluent in. It was strange at first but I got used to it pretty quickly. I do have to pepper my Spanish with a number of English words because there are simply some words I don't know. But it's also challenged me to learn more. My 4 year old now speaks Spanish better than I do (much easier for him to retain new vocabulary that we hear than it is for me) and frequently corrects my vocabulary and my grammar.

My point is even if your Spanish is less than perfect you can enable a young child to achieve fluency. One tool that really helps is reading a lot in Spanish. You'll both learn a lot of vocab.

 

Good luck again!

 

Genesta

[Guest Soria]

You have given some great ideas. I have two dds (10 & 6)and although my mother is Puerto Rican, she did not teach me Spanish as I grew up. I learned in school and although I am now fluent, I have difficulty just talking at home - dh does not speak Spanish. It's not natural for me. I am all about going outside my comfort zone, and know that I can, but how do I refuse to speak English when I have to teach history and science, etc.? I don't think changing all of our reading material to Spanish in every subject is realistic or feasible. Is it about speaking Spanish after all formal lessons are completed for the day? Am I being too black and white? I think you said you answer questions in Spanish? I appreciate your feedback and am very impressed with what you have done for your children so far. I just need a little more clarification. Thanks!

[jamnkats]

I have gone back and forth and back and forth on this subject and still don't know. The kids have all ranged from refusing to listen to Spanish (English is everyone's first language; I learned Spanish in 1987-90 traveling in South America) to becoming very intuitive. Those who embraced it have refused and those who have refused have embraced. It is a circle. :)

 

I have tried OPOL but it is REALLY hard for me as Spanish is definitely a 2nd language. It is draining. (OPOL=One Parent, One Language) So I then tried an hour a day but that is not enough. Then we tried OPOL again. And I was doing ok with that and being consistent and then had an allergy attack and now it has been 4 days of English and no Spanish.

 

So, no answer. But OPOL definitely works if you can stick to it. I think we'll try 1/2 day of OPOL and 1 day a week of no Spanish. They definitely have picked up a lot of vocabularly in the short time I've done OPOL thought.

[KingM]

How we handle it is that I speak only Spanish to our son and he gets English everywhere else. He understands Spanish just fine, but doesn't speak very much. Generally, he'll use a Spanish word only until he gets comfortable with the English equivalent and then he'll use English only. He's almost three.