Spanish for 2nd/3rd grade- tutor? class?

[CoffeeMusicLaughs]

Hi there,

 

My oldest is entering 3rd grade in the fall, and my second is entering 2nd grade. I'm thinking I might want to do Spanish instead of Latin (adding Latin maybe in 5th grade), because it's important to me that my kids learn the language. We fiddled around a little with Power Glide when my oldest was in 1st grade, but we didn't get very far. I was re-reading WTM and was reminded that if I really want them to learn to speak for real, they need regular conversation in the language with other people. The suggestion was to have a tutor come over twice a week (or more) or have them in a conversation class. I'm looking into this. Here are my questions.

 

Have any of you used tutors? Where did you find them? How much did you pay them? What kind of Spanish curriculum did you use along with this?

Have you had your kids in language classes? How much did they cost? Any recommendations or advice in this area?

 

I'm interested about any thoughts you have about Spanish curricula in general. I have an old version of Rosetta Stone Spanish for adults, and I wasn't very impressed. My son wasn't crazy about Power Glide. He thinks Muzzy is too juvenile (he's pretty advanced academically).

 

Thanks for all your thoughts!

 

Erin

[Miss Tick]

 

Have any of you used tutors? Where did you find them? How much did you pay them? What kind of Spanish curriculum did you user along with this?

Have you had your kids in language classes? How much did they cost? Any recommendations or advice in this area?

 

 

 

We have used once-a-week tutors which I then supplement with a variety of other work. I have found them by asking, asking, asking which is just not easy.

 

I am willing to pay about $20/hour.

 

With someone who is fluent I generally don't want to use a curriculum, I want as much spontaneous conversation as possible. My plan is about 20 minutes of the kids reading and taking dictation, 30 minutes of new vocabulary and game playing, and then finish with the tutor reading them a story. The games are usually familiar games done in Spanish. As my kids get older, and better, I want to have the tutor do things like cook or science projects or art instead of just games.

 

We are in between tutors right now, but I have felt like we made good progress by incorpoating narration and dictation a la WTM. Took my a long time to figure that out. ;-)

 

The language "classes" we've done were too casual, we didn't get much out of them.

 

HTH

[Desert Strawberry]

I used this program to introduce Spanish to my kids. http://www.gpb.org/salsa/term/episode Here's the classroom curriculum. We didn't do all of it. http://edu.wyoming.gov/Programs/standards/foreign_lang_content_and_standards.aspx

 

I have a Spanish-speaking background, so my accent is perfect and I can read and all that. I just skimmed the classroom activities, and hit up the highlights. My kids are now easily about to speak to each other in Spanish about the topics that were covered. THe activities are quite extensive, and the videos are voiced by native speakers. Even if you are not a speaker yourself, it should be fairly easy to work with this. Wyoming schools claim to turn out fluent speakers using this program in the classroom.

[Mom0012]

I think Homeschool Spanish Academy is great for elementary Spanish. You get to speak one-on-one via Skype with a native speaker 2X/week for something like $6/session. You really can't beat that. However, I do not care for their upper levels at all. I found their materials to be terrible -- riddled with errors, grammatically incorrect, 90% of the homework had vocab that had never been covered so my dd spent most of her time looking up all the words in the exercises rather than having what she had learned reinforced, no feedback on the homework. etc. I wasted a lot of time and money there. They claim to be able to customize the program any way you like, but I found them incapable of doing anything but following their own materials. I wanted to use my own program at home and have someone else focus on speaking and listening skills twice a week and they really were not able to move away from their curriculum and do that. They also were not able to place my dd properly and we spent 3/4 of the year covering material she knew backwards and forwards before we hit on anything new despite many promises. I think they have good intentions, and really do try, so I wonder if their company is just growing too quickly. Anyway, if you are just starting out and use their program, I think they are a great resource for the elementary level. I wish I had found them a few years ago.