Suffering with cabin fever? Oh no! I wanted to share some of the activities we are currently using in the classroom with you to help you beat the winter and bring the fun inside your classroom or home!The first topic I wanted to share with you is the house!
We share the basic house vocab:
House – Casa Cuarto- bedroom Sala – living room Cocina – kitchen Baño – bathroom
Table – mesa Chair- silla Sofa – sofá Bed – cama
We used flashcards to show the vocabulary, made into a memory game! Children all ages love memory games!
La casa, la casa, la casa tiene un piso, un piso, un piso, la casa tiene un piso
La casa, la casa, la casa tiene una puerta, una puerta, una puerta, la casa tiene una puerta
que abre y cierra, que abre y cierra, la casa tiene una puerta
La casa, la casa, la casa tiene una ventana, ventana, ventana, la casa tiene una ventana
La casa, la casa, la casa tiene un techo, un techo, un techo, la casa tiene un techo
Casa Tag- they will tag the part of the house, after you say the name, I give rewards for each correct answer.
Doll House Fun – even the boys have fun, because I brought some legos and we populated the house, they needed to place the doll or lego in a room and tell me the name of the room! Sooo much fun!
Legos were also used to build the favorite room of the house. Below are some pics of the amazing job they did!
We add the winter vocabulary and placed cotton and fake rain the “house” coloring page we used!
One of the students who is 6 worked on so many details in the room, it looked like an architect did it! Children never cease to amaze me!
Hope you enjoyed our activities and that you will use them and share your experience here on our blog!
Halloween is one of my favorite holidays! I love getting dressed up! Baking cookies, making special spookie recipes! I usually don’t teach on Halloween, but we have two schools which are open, so I am doing a special Halloween Class with the spider theme! I wanted to share the activities:
Children will sing La Aranita ( Itsy bitsy Spider)
I printed some spiders on hard paper and they need to place them in the web, counting them
I printed some in regular paper, each student gets a crayon and color it, they need to say the color, say ” araña negra” .
They watched the video:
Showed the book with the same name a short 4 page version and read in Spanish, I could not find a Spanish book, read the English book in Spanish. There is a spider book in Spanish, a very busy spider.
I bought an oversized spider and printed colorful circles and used tape and the children had to glue the spider to the circle on the wall and tell me, the spider is on the: La araña está en el rojo, la araña está en el blanco…..
Kids loved it! Hope you use these activities to bring a foreign language to your class or little one during Halloween or this week! Enjoy!
Happy Halloween!
Claudia Krusch
EasyLearn Languages
The class activities and ideas are protected by copyright, please ask author’s permission to copy activities and ideas in private classes.
Many parents ask me, is there Halloween in Spanish, well the majority of Spanish speaking countries do not have Halloween as it known in the US. They have Dia de Los Muertos which is a party and celebration to pay respects to the dead and celebrate death!
Spanish and Foreign Language teachers translate materials this time of the year to bring a little bit of Halloween to their classes!
I decided to share some of the words we used this week and let you know we have sets of flashcards and worksheets available for purchase on the website.
Spanish
Bruja – witch
Calabaza – pumpkin
Calavera- Esqueleton
Murcielago – bat
Fantasma – ghost
Bruxa – witch
abobora - pumpkin
Caveira- Esqueleton
Morcego – bat
Fantasma – ghost
Suggestion on activities: bring real pumpkins, place on the floor and tell the children they will go pumpkin picking and they need to count the pumpkins. They can paint pumpkins and tell the colors. You can use our memory cards to play memory game or throw mini pumpkin erasers on cards on the floor and say the word where they fall. We bought large pumpkins and they had to throw balls on pumpkins and say the color before they hit the pumpkins.
Videos on youtube, like Halloween para peques and others.
Happy Halloween – Feliz Dia de Las Brujas, Feliz Dia das bruxas
This week, while planning for our first multilingual playdate, I started thinking about how parents feel when they need to chose a foreign language to their children and why chose at all!
I have started a research to develop a program which will give parents some easy tools to teach basics of any languages at home, even without knowing the language and the most important, making it fun!
While thinking about activities for the playdate, I decided to use colorful balls and have children kick them around the room while counting the kicks, parents will coach with a helper sheet. Lot’s of fun!
If you would like to do this activity at home, here is the vocabulary for Spanish, Portuguese and German:
eins
1
zwei
2
drei
3
vier
4
fünf
5
sechs
6
sieben
7
acht
8
neun
9
zehn
10
eins
1
zwei
2
drei
3
vier
4
fünf
5
sechs
6
sieben
7
acht
8
neun
9
zehn
10
um
1
dois
2
tres
3
quatro
4
cinco
5
seis
6
sete
7
oito
8
nove
9
dez
10
uno
1
dos
2
tres
3
cuatro
4
cinco
5
seis
6
siete
7
ocho
8
nueve
9
diez
10
Going back to our question, I think above all, you need to offer a fun experience to your child, so if one or 10 languages, which they capable of learning at the same time, you must search for a fun way to bring them into their daily playtime and not make it a chore, a duty!!!
If you do the activity at home and send us the video to: claudia@easylearnlanguages.com, we will post your video on the blog.
Children will be invited to sing, dance and play games using soccer, dodge ball, monkey in the middle, hide and seek, shark and minos and other games all in Spanish!
I know some parents have been asking for activities to bring Summer and Spanish together! We have posted some on our FB page, but I wanted to share some of my favorites here:
1) Numbers- Please make sure you had exposed the child to numbers before, taught them and this activity will bring all the joy of counting alive! Buy an oversized bubble container, blow bubbles as the child pops them and counts in Spanish! Great outdoor activity!
2) Summer vocabulary- You can use a few words to start: Pelota de Playa ( beach ball), Castillo de arena ( sand castle), Toalla (towell), Gafas de sol ( sun glasses), Palo ( bucket), Oceano (ocean) and buy a small set of sand toys, which represent some of the words above ( Target has them), buy moon sand if you don’t have a sand box or can’t do it at the beach! Have the child play and make different things as you teach vocabulary.
3)Colors-Every summer we do a different water color project at our camps, this year we used a colorful parrot. They used fingerpainting as they were painting with primary colors and telling us the colors in Spanish, they also mixed the colors while doing it, so we had a chance to go over combinations as well. Here is a list of colors you can use:
amarillo — yellow
anaranjado — orange
azul — blue
blanco — white
dorado — golden
gris — gray
marrón — brown
negro — black
púrpura/morado — purple
rojo — red
rosado — pink
verde — green
We hope you have enjoyed our activities and to see you soon checking out our news!
I was singing to my son tonight and I sang all the same Brazilian Lullabies I always sing:
Boi da cara preta, Maezinha do céu, Chu chu chu, Sereia, Samba lele ( I will list those songs in another post)
He said Mom, Im kind of tired of the same songs, can you sing something different and I sang this song which reminds us how beautiful life is! It always makes me cry, because reminds me of Brazil! So I wanted to share here on the blog:
This month we decided to bring our Spring activities to the next level!
Children started this week, by contrasting the differences between winter and spring and singing a song about weather….we make hand motions and sing about lluvia(rain), sol (sun), viento ( wind) y nubens( clouds). We read a book called Primavera and they saw the trees with leaves and the bugs and birds who came back!
We also did a coloring page with a Mariposa ( butterfly) and a flor ( flower) and the kids would color and draw on the worksheet. You can easily make it at home with coloring page drawings.
I bought a collection of bugs and bug cat and nets and we went bug hunting, saying the name of the bug, color and comparing sizes.
Off course if you child never had Spanish before and you are starting, I would recommend just doing colors for now…..
I made a memory game with pictures of bugs and they had to match and say the name of the insect, Mariquita( lady bug), Escarabajo ( beetle), mariposa ( butterfly), abeja ( bee), saltamontes ( grasshopper).
I will be happy to answer questions and send the worksheet, if you wish to have it at home!
This is an easy recipe which you can make it and bring a foreign language at the same time!
Cook 2 Tbsp of butter
1 Tbsp of chocolate powder
1 can of condensed milk
Cook in low heat until mixture is not stuck to the pot, it falls off. We are looking for a more firm consistency. Spread butter on a plate and spread the cooked mixture and let it cool off until you can take a piece and make a 1 inch ball with it. Roll the ball on jimmys or sugar or nuts. Ask kids to help you make the balls and count them in Portuguese or Spanish as you roll them.
Today I started my mission to post some of my mom’s favorite recipes and some Spanish and Italian recipes. I promise I will not post things that were incorporated to the American Cuisine! Please try my recipes and tell me what you and your family said about it!
Bolinhos de Carne a Baiana – Brazilian Meatballs
Ingredients:
1 pound of ground beef
1 small onion
black pepper and cumin (depends on how much you like, I put a little bit of each)
salt
3 eggs
bread crumbs
1 cup of flour
Mix ground beef, chopped onion, cumin, pepper, salt and 1 egg and place in the fridge for 2 hours. Make small balls and pass in the flour, egg, then bread crumbs and place in a skillet with hot oil, enough to cover the meatballs. Cook until brown. Serve on top of spaghetti or rice. Please no tomato sauce. Brazilians usually eat that on top of white rice, but my family likes it with pasta cooked sauteed on butter.
