This is a topic which I love, but I never find good ideas or nice materials to teach a great Valentine’s class or Spanish Classes in February! So this year, I decided to

innovate and I created Spanish and Portuguese classes with the Valentine Day topic which not only teach the vocabulary of a day which is celebrated in some Spanish speaking countries but also teach children to share and show friendship! Enjoy!

Today I will share my ideas for Spanish:

1) Children ages 3-5 will hold on a portion of a large tablecloth, making a sort of parachute and place a light pink ball in the middle, la pelota de la amistad! When the ball pops up, they will shout amigo, when stays on/around the tablecloth, they will shout pasa…pasa! children love to move the ball around!

2) Children will pass a soft ball, and say Pasa, pasa, pasa mi amigo! The teacher will stop and say Amigo randomly and the child who has the ball will share it with a friend in the circle….teaches them how to share and how to be nice to friends. Songs are originals composed and written by me. Email me for words and tune.

3) I also show the snoopy San Valentin cartoon which is cute:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F4kpl1kuAI

4) We made a San Valentin card which they colored and cut. I don’t have a template to upload to the blog but you can easily make a card and have them color it.

5) Lucky charms craft- I used the marshmallow hearts on lucky charms box and they glued to a heart shape. They loved doing it! You can use paper heart or stickers as well.

6) Valentine’s Tic tac toe – regular template with hearts printed on card stock as pieces, white and red.

I hope you enjoy my activities! Try some of them with your little ones!

Saludos Amigos,

Claudia Krusch

EasyLearn Languages CEO

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!

We sing the House rap ©  Claudia Krusch (pointing to the parts of the house, the children love it!)

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!

Claudia Krusch

EasyLearn Languages

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:

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.

Have fun!

Claudia Krusch

EasyLearn Languages

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:

A vida- Gonzaguinha

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwDRty6NT6g&feature=related

I hope you enjoy it!

Abraços,

Claudia Krusch

Children-More CEO

Dear Readers,

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!

Saludos,

Claudia Krusch

EasyLearn Languages CEO

I thought a lot before offering Valentine’s classes in Portuguese because Brazilian people don’t celebrate it! I decided to bring the theme and incorporate some ideas used in the Spanish class, so they would still learn the vocabulary without meaning less translations.
I created a math worksheet with hearts, they learn the word heart, coração and had to add the hearts on the page, children 3 and under just had to look, count on fingers and give me the answer in Spanish, with them I used hearts I cut out and we did the math on the rug.
I also used the song beijo, Ivete San Galo to talk about Valentine words…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXvcKm6tERQ
We played a tic tac toe with pictures cut where they would have to use thier piece to try to win
I used pictures of hearts- coração, cupid – cupido, chocolate- chocolate, baloons-balão
I explained in Brazil, Valentine’s Day is in June and it’s called the boyfriend/girlfriend’s day, it’s not for friends, but for people
who are inlove, married, in a relationship.
They loved the activities and learned Portuguese!
Até a próxima!
Abraços,
Claudia Krusch
EasyLearn Languages CEO

Dear readers,

This is a topic which I love, but I never find good ideas or nice materials to teach a great Valentine’s class or Spanish Classes in February! So this year, I decided to

innovate and I created Spanish and Portuguese classes with the Valentine Day topic which not only teach the vocabulary of a day which is celebrated in some Spanish speaking countries but also teach children to share and show friendship! Enjoy!

Today I will share my ideas for Spanish:

1) Children ages 3-5 will hold on a portion of a large tablecloth, making a sort of parachute and place a light pink ball in the middle, la pelota de la amistad! When the ball pops up, they will shout amigo, when stays on/around the tablecloth, they will shout pasa…pasa! children love to move the ball around!

2) Children will pass a soft ball,  and say Pasa, pasa, pasa mi amigo! The teacher will stop and say Amigo randomly and the child who has the ball will share it with a friend in the circle….teaches them how to share and how to be nice to friends. Songs are originals composed and written by me. Email me for words and tune.

3) I also show the snoopy San Valentin cartoon which is cute:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F4kpl1kuAI

4)  We made a San Valentin card which they colored and cut. I don’t have a template to upload to the blog but you can easily make a card and have them color it.

5) Lucky charms craft- I used the marshmallow hearts on lucky charms box and they glued to a heart shape. They loved doing it! You can use paper heart or stickers as well.

I hope you enjoy my activities! Try some of them with your little ones!

Saludos Amigos,

Claudia Krusch

EasyLearn Languages CEO

This past week we worked on several themes and home and furniture was one of them!

Children would look at pictures of rooms in the house and learn their names, then we would work on a game and they would place items in each room, making vocab work easy and fun! For example, we place a sink,lavabo in the bathroom, baño.

We sang en la casa, en la casa hay….using room names

baño – bathroom

sala de estar – living room

cuarto – bedroom

cocina- kitchen

We also watched the video from Boca Beth which tours a house, the video is called La Casa, where a chicken shows children things in the rooms.

Children had to cut and glue parts of the house and make their own house., older ones had to tell me their favorite rooms, why, describe their rooms as well.

Loved sharing this subject with our little ones!

I hope you enjoyed it!

Claudia Krusch

EasyLearn Languages CEO