Spanish for my 7th grader - Easy Peasy?

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My dd has done half a level of Rosetta Stone and did a lot of Duolingo last year.  She is still in the "beginning" stage.  She can say a few basic phrases and knows a few dozen vocab words, and can listen, and pronounce pretty well.

 

I'd like her to get something more serious than Duolingo for this year, mostly because I just feel that Duolingo is hard to be consistent with, and hard for me to benchmark.

 

My goal, is for her to start out with high school foreign language with a leg up, on more sure footing.  If she could take SPanish 1 as an 8th grader that would be cool, but I am too realistic to make that a "goal" at this point rather than a dream.

 

Whatever we use needs to be relatively self teaching, include several modalities, and not be completely boring.  And, I am hoping it'll be something we wont' give up on due to being too time consuming....about half an hour per day plus study time (40 minutes total?) would be best.

 

I am looking at Easy Peasy and feeling like that would be good but maybe something with a little more grammar might be nice.  However my dd struggles with memorizing parts of speech and grammar concepts so maybe not.  :o)

 

 

[2_girls_mommy]

I don't know Duolingo, so I don't know how it compares. We are doing EasyPeasy 7th grade this year. But I am adding one day a week of grammar using Easy Step by Step Spanish.  Since we are doing it once a week, It looks that I will do one chapter over a month. You could speed this up to get more done in a year, or reinforce it daily in your 40 minutes. I won't even get close to finishing the book with her this year, but will probably spread it out into next year. For the daily online work with EasyPeasy, my dd only spends about 20 minutes. I don't see any grammar practice so far, but I admit I didn't look up the whole year's plans in Easy Peasy. I like the fun games and vocabulary practice and the independence of it.  My goals are the same as yours= just a leg up for high school.

[happypamama]

I have not looked at EasyPeasy, but tbh, my DD has learned a ton from consistent, near-daily use with DuoLingo, enough that she can understand some conversational Spanish when she overhears it, far better than I could after years 1-2 of French. She does the flash card section for review and also has liked the immersion section (you might need full site, not a tablet/phone app for those), where she translates articles that interest her from Wikipedia into Spanish. I think people give feedback on that too. I will say that grammar comes easily to her, so ymmv. (For record keeping, I have her take screen shots of her DuoLingo tree, which she saves in a file, and I will print a few for her portfolio.)

 

She and I also went through Getting Started With Spanish, which is appropriate for any age. It introduces everything very gently and with tons of review. I can't say enough good stuff about the GSW series.

 

We are about to start working through Advanced Spanish Step By Step by Barbara Bregstein to supplement the DuoLingo grammar, and there is an Easy level too. That might be a good option for grammar. And then I want to have her start reading simple books and watching videos of some sort.

 

With all of that, I think my DD could easily have finished Spanish 1, possibly 2. She's in ninth grade this year, and I am considering online/college classes in eleventh grade, possibly next year. Ideally, she could take some sort of placement test to see where she is, but I have t worked all that out yet.