Teaching Spanish and Latin at the same time

[ohmommatxca]

I was curious to see if anyone has a good schedule or insight on teaching Spanish and Latin together. I will be using First Form Latin and have been slowly making our way through Spanish for Children A... for three years LOL!

 

Does anyone have any insight on:

1) Confusion of the languages being taught together

2) How do I integrate fours ages in all of this: 11, 9, 7, 5

3) What should be my best course of action in terms of work load per kid?

 

I am fairly fluent in Spanish, but it isn't my native tongue. Has anyone ever tried to teach a non-native tongue to their kids soley by speaking it? I am nervous to go solo without a curriculum for fear I will teach them incorrectly... like I will use the second person conjugation of a verb instead of the first person or something like that. Do you ever do a "one day" we are only speaking Spanish and put formal school aside?

 

(I should probably mention that I wasn't going to teach Latin, but now that my eldest has been in Essentials with Classical Conversations for 2 years, he needs that next level of grammar and I believe that Latin will give that to him.)

 

Thoughts? Help :-)

[Ariston]

I do Spanish and Latin and have had zero problems with confusion. I think kids are able to learn lots of languages without much problem. I have found, though, that I have had to lower my expectations with Latin because I realized how much of an effort it would be with Spanish. I think to do both languages on a basic level would be easy, but to try to achieve fluency in both, for me, seemed like too much. So I ended up pouring my efforts into Spanish and then just doing what I can in Latin. I'm trying to get them as proficient as I can in Spanish and then will ramp up Latin later. Maybe if you are better than I am at multi-tasking this wouldn't be as much of a problem for you!

 

As far as teaching Spanish, I really recommend this book for your situation: http://www.amazon.co...s stuff spanish But jeez, that price is ridiculous ..its is a very thin book. Maybe you can find it used somewhere?

 

Anyway it basically has every phrase you would ever say to a child, so it is great for your situation. You can read through it and confirm to yourself that you have the grammar right. I'd recommend adding as much into your daily life as you feel comfortable doing. You can start just with "Es hora de cenar...te lavaste bien las manos?" adding in some hand signals so they understand you. Or if you are comfortable you can do all of mealtime in Spanish , or en entire morning, or the entire day!

 

Try not to be too scared of making mistakes. How many times do you make mistakes or misspeak when you're speaking English, yet you don't beat yourself up? And my dad speaks terrible English but he still spoke it to us...it didn't mess us up too badly :)

Elena

[ohmommatxca]

Elena,

 

Thank you for your response! It was so helpful to realize that it will be okay if I do not speak perfect Spanish to my kids. Thanks also for the link to amazon. I will have to see if it exists somewhere else in a more economical fashion :-) . I would rather just speak to my kids in Spanish and focus on the Latin grammar and then work Spanish into a more academic way later.

[jhschool]

We do Spanish and Latin and it works just fine.

No confusions.

We have Spanish and French confusions, though.

But Latin is so "different" that DC doesn't mix them up.

[Halcyon]

We do spanish and latin here as well...but latin is our focus right now, which probaly accounts for why we are into just chapter 3 of our spanish book despite studying for 6 months lol. ThEre is little confusion.

 

In terms of schedule, initially we were doi g 2 days of spanish and 4 days of latin. But now it is more like 7 days of latin and 1 day of spanis. Trying to rebalance this a bit.

[JadeOrchidSong]

We do Chinese, Latin, and Spanish every day. Yesterday I found that I mixed the bedrooms of the two. The boys are ok.

[Ariston]

We do Chinese, Latin, and Spanish every day. Yesterday I found that I mixed the bedrooms of the two. The boys are ok.

 

Yes, that's a good point. I should have said YOU will be very confused and mix things up all the time, but your kids--with their little language acquistion machines we call brains--will be fine! :)