Spanish for 5 1/2 year old??

[hands-on-mama]

We recently "adopted" a family from Nicaragua. We send a pledge monthly and also send letters back and forth to the family. We received our first letter from them and the original was written in Spanish. My daughter started asking a lot about the writing and would now like to learn some Spanish. She really hopes to visit the little girl we have pictures of-as would we-so I say why not roll with it.

 

Are they any great resources for this age group?

[Punchie]

A lot of people like Salsa Spanish (it's free). We haven't used it, but we do like Song School Spanish. When DD was a K'er we started/attempted La Clasa Divertida, but ended up stopping a little more than halfway through it.

[twoxcell]

I also recommend Salsa Spanish as a good place to start. Here are some other free videos. My kids also really enjoyed Speekee spanish at that age. HTH

[Miss Tick]

There are a lot of great ways to get started with Spanish and building up your Spanish vocabulary!

 

Salsa is good. We just do it once a week, you can find lesson plans out there somewhere but I've never used them.

 

Don't forget to check your library, ours has a few basic Spanish for kids videos (Little Pim, Whistlefritz, etc.) and a bunch of board books and picture books in Spanish (many familiar ones translated from English), plus a variety of "First 1,000 Spanish words" or similar picture dictionaries. They also have a number of cds of kids' music in Spanish. One of the local libraries has Muzzy online and you can watch a segment and then play some games.

 

I've printed a few basic Spanish readers from the McGraw Hill website.

 

Also, Babybug is coming out with some editions in Spanish, I haven't seem them myself.

 

The BBC has a number of Spanish-language resources on their site that you might want to explore.

 

There are also plenty of programs you could spend money on, of course. Also, if YOU have ever studied Spanish there are more possibilities for teaching children that are, um, facilitated (?) with Spanish instructions, like this one. Or even taking common games (Guess Who?, Headbandz, Rory's Story Cubes, etc.) and using them in Spanish. We also enjoy the kids' cartoon Pocoyo in Spanish on YouTube once in a while (I also found a season at the library).

 

Have fun!