Last week I shared this video on my personal Facebook page with the caption: "This is for everyone who asks me if I am teaching my girls Spanish...It's a work in progress!"
Some days we progress more than others but I have learned a few things about what works and doesn't work in my short time of teaching a second language at home to my own little ones:
- Use music whenever possible. In learning the body parts, we have sung "Cabeza, hombros, piernas, pies" many, many times. For the first several days, it seemed that they were just imitating me as I pointed to my heads, shoulders, legs, and feet (the Spanish version is slightly different from the English!). They loved the song though and especially liked watching me look crazy as I sang it faster and faster. Fast forward one week: I overheard my oldest singing it during playtime in their room with the younger one joining in occasionally. Now, my oldest regularly wants to perform the song on her own without help!
- Make it personal. Getting an iPad mini as my combination birthday/Christmas present has been a huge asset for language acquisition. I recently downloaded iMovie and we are becoming movie-making machines. With the video above, the vocabulary focus was parts of the body. Within the iMovie app, I used the camera to take pictures one at a time stopping between each one to record the audio. The girls simply repeated me to the best of their ability. Most of the time they had no clue what they were saying! But, guess what they want to watch if I allow a little screen time on my iPad? Yep! A video of themselves and that vocabulary is sinking in with every viewing!
- Embed vocabulary in simple sentences. As a classroom bilingual teacher, I have always preached the use of language frames to scaffold students' speaking and writing. As I was starting with my completely NON-Spanish speakers, I realized that most language instruction resources begin with individual vocabulary words (colors, body parts, food, etc.). The problem is that learning a list of words is the equivalent of learning a bunch of phonograms when trying to teach a child to read. My educational philosophy tends to lean towards whole to part instruction rather than part to whole. For this reason, I embedded the vocabulary in a predictable sentence (Yo tengo...).
- Add text. My oldest has recently become a fairly proficient decoder in English. Adding the text to our iMovie provides her the support when she forgets the words in Spanish. Even though we haven't yet gone into all of the differences between phonics in English and Spanish, she is quickly learning that reading in Spanish is pretty easy. Hello, biliteracy! This is my goal...whether it happens from English to Spanish or Spanish to English!
My plan is to continue making more iMovie videos every other week or so as we tackle new sets of vocabulary. These are some predictable patterns that I currently have rolling around in my head:
- Yo puedo…(brincar, correr, hablar, etc.)
- Me gusta comer (la manzana, la pizza, el plátano, etc.)
- Mi (hermana/tía/abuelo) se llama __________.
