Advanced Preschool Spanish

[Parker Martin]

We have been using "Bonjour les Amis!" for French and "Hola Amigos!" for Spanish with our three year old. Both have been excellent, and he's learned a lot from them. (I'm surprised that they fit so much vocabulary onto their DVDs.)

 

We are going to continue with Spanish, picking French back up in later grades, and I'm trying to figure out where to go from here. My son has a pretty decent working vocabulary now (common nouns, numbers, colors, weather, etc.), and he figured out how to read Spanish because those programs show the text at the bottom of the screen.

 

Would Muzzy be a good option for a kid like this? Even though he can read and knows a lot of Spanish, he's still three, so I'm not sure that he would enjoy or understand something aimed at much older children. For now I've been checking out Spanish versions of books he likes from the library, but I'd like to offer him something in addition to this.

 

What have you tried and what have been your outcomes?

 

Another issue is that I do not speak Spanish, and my son is getting way ahead of me, so it's hard for me to speak Spanish with him. As it is, he ends up teaching me. Can anyone endorse a program for adults that brought them up to basic fluency?

[Parker Martin]

Another note: My son does not know how to use the computer, and we're not planning to introduce that for several years, so any computer programs are out.

[MaMa2005]

You might get some good answers if you posted over on the Bi-Lingual board. :001_smile:

[Dmmetler]

If you have access to United Streaming/Discovery streaming check out Elementary Spanish. The 1st/2nd would be very accessible to a preschooler (almost no writing, and a lot of TPR-type activities), and it moves into conversational Spanish and sentence construction quickly. Since the videos are divided into clips, it makes it possible to skip redundant vocabulary lessons and go to what's new in the lesson, which is important in keeping your child from going crazy as they're, for the umpteenth time, taught to count to 10!

 

Two other resources I'd suggest:

Ana Lomba-Hop, Jump and Sing Spanish and Play and Learn Spanish. Both are audio CDs, Play and Learn also has a book. In both cases, they're activities you do with the CD-Hop Jump and Sing is songs, finger plays, and movement activities, while Play and Learn involves text and pictures. Instructions are in English on a separate track, and the activity is done completely in Spanish. I ordered my copies from Amazon.

 

Bilingual Songs. There are at least 3 volumes. Volume 1 introduces mostly the standard little kid Spanish vocabulary, but 2 and 3 get more into Spanish grammar and construction. I found these at a local Teacher's store.

 

Finally, many children's videos have Spanish language tracks, and these are useful for picking up new vocabulary. Preschool programming is very nice for this, since it's designed for teaching ENGLISH concepts and vocabulary. There are quite a few Sesame Street videos in Spanish available for free download on iTunes, too.

[Parker Martin]

Thank you very much for your suggestions. We'll give them a go.

[Steven]

We used Muzzy with a 18-month old, and she loved it, so it would not be over the head of your 3-year old. By the way, if you still have a VCR player, go on e-Bay and buy old Muzzy tapes. Don't bother with any of the computer extras. The old tapes sell very cheaply, but as soon as someone has a computer disk to go along with the tape, they want to charge more. The DVDs are way overpriced, even on e-Bay.