Proud of DS (and myself)

[wendyroo]

I have always made Spanish a priority in our homeschool, but it is one of the subjects I am least confident about. My Spanish skills are intermediate at best, and largely useless practically because I was taught with a strong vocab and grammar focus that fully prepared me to fill out conjugation charts but not to really communicate.

I have used the comprehensible input method of language teaching for my kids starting fairly early - just piecing together various activities and resources. The advantage is that it is fun for them, and teaching them to be confident, intuitive Spanish communicators, but the disadvantage is that progress is uneven and hard to measure. I have always had a general sense that all the kids are improving, but no good way to measure their progress.

This past year my oldest was in 6th grade, and I called his studies "Spanish 3" because that seemed to most closely match his level. I tentatively gave him a high school credit because I knew he was certainly spending the time and doing rigorous work, but a big part of me wondered what level he was "actually" at. 

Well, for this coming year I found DS an online, comprehensible input Spanish class. He had to do an interview/evaluation with the teacher in order to place into an upper level class, and the teacher says that he will be entering as a very strong Spanish 4 student. Yay!! She said that his grammar is right on target and that his conversation, reading and listening comprehension are well above average for that level. This is exactly what I wanted to hear and gives me a boost of confidence that all my hard work is producing results if I just stay the course!

[Kassia]

That is fantastic news!  Congratulations to both of you!  🙂

 

[mom2bee]

Phenomenal! Great Job!

[Junie]

Great job!!

[Mrskitty76]

That's wonderful! Congratulations!

[Not_a_Number]

Yay!! That's super exciting. 

[Eilonwy]

Well done to you both!

[JessinTX]

This is so encouraging to me!! I've also really tried to prioritize Spanish for my DD 5. Like you I speak, read and write some Spanish, but it's by no means fluent. 

Our school district started a dual-language immersion program for PK-2, and I enrolled DD last year, but I'm really debating whether I want to continue for the upcoming year. I know immersion is the best way to learn and it feels foolish to give up this opportunity (it's a public school, but kind of like a magnet school - we had to apply and get accepted.) BUT it's across town and takes up a lot of my day to transport her back and forth, and because of her birthday they've placed her a grade behind where she is academically, so we're still "after schooling" which makes it hard to really cover what I want to cover with her. And she didn't really learn as much Spanish as I thought she would last year - but last year was so weird and she was doing school virtually nearly as much as she was there in person, so may not be fair to evaluate the program based on last year... 

Anyway your story makes me feel like there is some hope that I could really teach her enough Spanish for her to really become fluent. I'd love to hear more about your process and how you built up to where your DS is now, starting when he was young. 

[lulalu]

Great job! 

[Not_a_Number]

On 7/17/2021 at 2:32 AM, JessinTX said:

I'd love to hear more about your process and how you built up to where your DS is now, starting when he was young. 

I'm not the OP, but I can tell you that we've gotten pretty high levels of fluency in a foreign language in my household in the last few years. I'm a native speaker of the language we've been doing, though. But I'll say that what we've been doing is "limited immersion": we watch cartoons in the language, and then we have some pretty high impact conversation for about 30-45 minutes in the language. We do that about 4 days a week. 

Edited July 18, 2021 by Not_a_Number

[wendyroo]

On 7/17/2021 at 2:32 AM, JessinTX said:

Anyway your story makes me feel like there is some hope that I could really teach her enough Spanish for her to really become fluent. I'd love to hear more about your process and how you built up to where your DS is now, starting when he was young. 

I've done a lot of reading and watching about comprehensible input and do my very best to implement it using various resources to compensate for my own Spanish shortcomings.

I start when my kids are young using some simple commands (siéntate, recógelos, dámelo, etc.) interchangeably with the English equivalents. I avoid translating for the kids, but rather use gestures or modeling to get the point across. Once they have truly acquired those phrases (respond to them with little thought), then I start using them to introduce vocab: dame tu plato. recoge los libros, siéntate aquí, etc.

Around 4ish, I move on to working on the "Super 7" verbs: estoy, hay, tengo, soy, me gusta, voy, and quiero. At first I use first person 75% of the time and second person 25% of the time (when asking them questions). I model for a long time using inflection, gestures and props to insure they figure out what they mean: "Tengo helado" holding it out triumphantly, "Me gusta helado" rubbing my stomach, "¿Te gusta helado? ¿Tú te gusta helado en tu estomago? rubbing their stomach, etc. At first I prompt for answers by asking "¿sí o no?", after a while they spontaneously start answering sí or no, then when I think they are ready, I start prompting for more complete answers using the Super 7 verbs: "Tengo una camisa roja. ¿Tienes una camisa roja?"...and when they answer "sí", I prompt them with "Di 'sí' (they say it) 'tengo' (they say it) 'una camisa' (they say it) 'roja' (they say it)". Of course I don't do that until I am sure that they are familiar and comfortable with all of those words. At this point we are also using gestures to go along with every word. Sí is a thumbs up, tengo is a flat hand palm up that is slowly closed into a fist grasping something, camisa is fingering the hem of our shirt, and rojo/a is drawing a circle on something red. Once they are comfortably producing mimic sentences (¿Tienes una camisa roja? Sí tengo una camisa roja.) then I start introducing question words so that they can answer more open-endedly (¿Cuántas zanahorias tienes? Tengo tres zanahorias.).

During this same 4/5 year old stage, I make sure the kids are getting daily, fun Spanish input. They watch Spanish YouTube videos, we listen to Spanish songs, I read aloud Spanish picture books, etc. We subscribe to The ULAT which is a Spanish curriculum (actually aimed at much older kids) that uses immersion and gestures and pictures; even my youngest kiddos watch some of the episodes. Some of my kids have participated in a comprehensible input weekly Spanish class at this age.

Our next big milestone is the kids learning to read Spanish; this typically happens sometime in first grade after they are solid, fluent English readers. Once they are Spanish readers, then the rest is just doing more and more of the same things at harder and harder levels. They spend a ton of time watching and listening to input; I read aloud and ask questions and discuss books with them in Spanish; they read aloud to me (and later to themselves) and answer questions and discuss the books; they watch The ULAT; they complete comprehensible input activities that I find on Teachers Pay Teachers; they work in Duolingo, etc. I do introduce grammar gradually as it comes up in stories or as they want to say certain things, we also watch a ton of Señor Jordan YouTube videos about grammar topics and I have a couple Practice Makes Perfect Spanish grammar workbooks that I pull pages from occasionally for older kids to work on specific skills. When kiddos are ready they start writing in Spanish and eventually submit some things to Lang-8 for native speakers to correct their writing.

Up until the pandemic, all my kids were in the weekly immersion Spanish class, but I pulled them out last March. At that point, my oldest started iTalki sessions with a tutor/conversation partner. I did not have a clue how well he would do, but after a couple session he just took off! He LOVES his sessions and now considers his tutor a good friend. DS is autistic and quirky, and his tutor does a great job engaging him in his interests in Spanish. DS loves math and logic and board games, so he spends his tutoring sessions playing games (especially chess), having deep philosophical discussions (last week they were discussing reasons why they do/don't believe in God), complaining about his siblings, explaining math/science/history he is learning, talking about Lego, watching and talking about gross/goofy video clips, etc. This has, by far, been the activity that has catapulted DS's Spanish ability far above mine...but, I don't think it would have worked early on - he really needed to have a firm foundation before he could engage with a tutor about interesting topics that really drew him into conversation. So for now, he will continue his tutoring while also taking the comprehensible input Spanish 4 class, and I will continue working with the younger kids myself until they are at a level I think they will benefit from a tutor...well, except that my oldest now does a few short lessons with my youngest every week because he can now provide more fluent comprehensible input for her than I can! 😃

 

[JessinTX]

So helpful wendyroo! It sounds a lot like what we've been doing. She has two shows on PBS that she watches in Spanish, and we watch YouTube videos for songs on colors, numbers, shapes, etc. I hadn't really thought about focusing on particular verbs that way... I've more focused on vocabulary (nouns), so I'm going to start incorporating that more. She does know me gusta... tienes... and quieres pretty solid. 

I will look into ULAT too - never heard of that. 🙂