spanish phonics?

[cmarango]

Hi everyone,

 

I have a little dd who is growing up in a spanish/english household. I am trying to plan ahead for learning to read materials and have a few questions. Hopefully, someone has been through this before because I am clueless. My husband (the native spanish speaker) only has a limited amount of time after work to spend with her so I speak some spanish with her as well. Most likely, I will be doing the majority of reading instruction.

 

1. Should I introduce learning to read simultaneously in both languages?

2. Is there a program for teaching children to read spansih (like phoncs for spanish)? I am wondering if certain letters/combinations are introduced first.

3. At what point would it be advisable to introduce a third language? I am thinking of doing either Latin or German (family ties).

 

Thanks for any help that you can provide.

 

Christina

[Paisley Hedgehog]

..

[Matryoshka]

Spanish is virtually 100% phonetic. Every letter has a pronunciation that doesn't change (well, except c and g before e and i, but that's fairly easy). There are only 5 vowel sounds, which are actually the 5 phonetic vowel sounds. Two vowels together? Pronounce each one separately and blend. H is the only "silent" letter, and it's always silent.

 

My kids learned to read English and German virtually simultaneously with no problem. Added Spanish about a year later, also no problem. I told them, after English, German is easy (more phonetically regular than English), and Spanish is a no-brainer.

 

I think what really helped is using the methods in Reading Reflex, that do not teach that a letter "says" anything like many phonics programs do, but that we use letters (and letter combinations) to represent sounds that we make. Sometimes we use different letters/combinations for the same sound. So it never troubled them that in other languages the letters/combinations may represent different sounds than in English - it was really, really easy to say "in German we use 'eu' for the /oi/ sound, or we use 'sch' instead of 'sh' to represent the /sh/ sound". And going from German to Spanish, "in Spanish they use 'j' where German uses 'ch'". Didn't phase them for a moment - their decoding skills in all three languages are excellent.

[cmarango]

Thanks for the suggestions. I have been looking at various spanish programs that have been recommended on this board, but I haven't found one that addresses the needs of a native speaker. Most of the programs are for children who have not heard the target language before (make sense?) and that is a little frustrating.

 

matroyshka - Is there any particular order that you introduced the sounds in spanish? I was thinking that we would do the vowels first, but then after that I didn't know if there was a "better" order in which to introduce the consonants. Also, how do you keep up all 3 languages? I have read somewhere that children need to hear a language for about 2 hours every day to retain perfect fluency.

 

Thanks so much,

Christina

[ElizabethB]

La pata pita is out of print, but it is designed for the native speaker and uses syllables.

 

There are some used ones on Amazon:

 

http://www.amazon.com/Pata-Pita-Hilda-Perera/dp/0805601341/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228856788&sr=8-1

 

and, volume 2:

 

http://www.amazon.com/Pata-Pita-Vuelve-Segundo-Lectura/dp/0805601406/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228856849&sr=8-2

[Matryoshka]

Have you seen the José Luis Orozco CDs? There's a vowel song and also an alphabet song on one of them.

 

Since your dd already knows the sounds, though, you really just have to show her what letters go with them - Spanish is so very, very straightforward.

 

As for keeping up the languages, they have instruction once a week (three hours for German, one for Spanish), and they pretty much can only watch videos in the foreign languages, except for the occaisional science or history one. We have tons of CDs that we listen to in the car. They also have written homework for the instruction every week that we work on 1-2 days a week, and reading as soon as they're able.

 

Right now they're watching a Spanish video - Las Tres Mellizas, which was just recommended to me over on the Spanish board - they love it!