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’m so excited to have a new team member working on new fall activities for our locations! We are working on incorporating more Science and Math, while using the Gym locations to make our program more interactive, combining Spanish and exercise: our new Mueve Program ©!

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!

Claudia Krusch

EasyLearn Languages

I’m so excited to announce that we listened to parents and we are now offering our summer book with activities to be used at home! The book contains 20 pages of pure fun, coloring pages, games, suggestions on activities and more! The book is recommended for children 2-7 years old, but some of the activities can be done with older ones as well!
Make it a family fun time and join us in the great journey of bringing foreign languages to little ones!
To purchase the book only, go to our site: www.easylearnlanguages.com and make a payment of $ 10.00 + shipping and handling and you will receive your book at home or receive instructions for download.
To join the membership portion of our site, you will click on the membership icon on this blog and follow instructions, that will give you the book, personal consultation on how to use it, newsletter with great articles, class plans and more!
I am proud of our new venture and I hope you enjoy it too!

Saludos,
Claudia Krusch
EasyLearn Languages Programs Director

I have answered this question more than 5 times this week, which motivated me to bring this topic to our blog.

Children who are exposed on a 30min foreign language class a week, will basically forget a lot of what was learned if the stimulus cease.

I highly encourage parents to buy cds, invest on classes, books anything that can keep the foreign language present in their lives!

Amazon offers many options of cds with songs and programs, classes as also offered nationwide and Bookstores like Barnes and Noble offer many offerings for at least 5 different languages, which can be easily downloaded to an ipad with the B&N reader, an app for ipads.

Please e-mail me privately if you wish to receive recommendation for specific materials and to receive a free sample of my spanish summer activity guide!

Enjoy the summer!

Claudia Krusch- Director of EasyLearn Language Programs

Finishing up the details of our summer camp activities, working with my interns and staff made me think about how we should bring an innovative approach to foreign language teaching, challeging the children, raising the bar for offering fun and educative activities in an outdoor environment. Those ideas and concepts took shape in a form of a resource book for summer activities to be used by teachers and parents.

After many parents have asked what they should do to bring Spanish to their children while at home with them,  the book idea seemed not only an idea but a need. I then decided to work on a easy, well designed workbook to help parents who don’t speak Spanish to bring the fun home! We included topics such as numbers, colors, family, body parts, shapes and more, suggestions on activities, coloring pages and songs and audio for each topic to allow parents to repeat the words and sing songs with children while using the book. It is done in Spanish but the activities can be applied to any language.

My personal suggestion is that no matter what, it needs to be a fun time, when mommy or daddy will play with the child and have Spanish as a background to spending time with your child.

Use summer friendly toys such as water slide for colors, water baloons for counting, chalk for reinforcing vocabulary, treasure hunting for developing a deeper understanding of the language, bug catching for vocabulary and nature exploration and more….

The book will be available next week on our membership page!

Saludos,

Claudia Krusch

EasyLearn Programs

Some parents asked about our summer camps and how to invest on bringing the best of a foreign language program to summer fun, so we decided to post our summer camps schedule on the blog for a week, after that, we will have it on our site. Enrolment has started. Come and Splash en español this summer!

                                                                                  Spanish Splashing Summer Camps

                                                                                                  EasyLearn Programs

West Deptford

July 26^th-30^th    August 16^th-20^th

10-12 am 2 hours of pure fun! Outdoor activities, sports, nature exploration at the park besides the office, water games, summer vocabulary, basic Spanish concepts and more!! Snack is included.

Cost: $ 60.00 per week / Ages 3-5 and 5-7.

Cherry Hill

August 2-6^th

10-12 am 2 hours of pure fun! Outdoor activities, sports, nature exploration at the playground area, water games, basic Spanish concepts and more!! Snack is provided.

Cost: $ 50.00 per week / Ages 3-6.

Lumberton

August 9-13^th

10-12 am 2 hours of pure fun! Outdoor activities, sports, nature exploration at the playground area, water games and more!! Snack is provided.

Cost: $ 99.00 per week / Ages 3-8.

Fox

All summer, every Friday in July and August, two hours per Friday, 10-12pm! Outdoor activities, sports, nature exploration at the playground area, water games and more!! Snack is provided.

Cost: $ 50.00 per month / Ages 3-6

Mullica Hill

July 19-23rd, afternoon times per age.  Outdoor activities, sports, nature exploration at the playground area, water games and more!!

                                                                            For more information, call 856-848-8870

I hope you enjoy my vocabulary list and suggestions:

El Sol – Sun

La Playa – Beach

La Sombrilla- the umbrella

La crema – the lotion

La arena – the sand

El Castillo- The castle

El Mar – The sea

El Calor- The heat

A few activities which can be used when teaching summer and beach themes are:

*Use colored sand and have them cover the word playa for example

*Buy precut fish craft and have them put it together, teaching fish and other sea animals

*Buy plastic fishing kit, they children will love to go fishing and learn about water and animals

*Beach Ball can be used to be passed, each student will need to say a beach word in Spanish when you stop the song

I also use some songs such as, vamos a la playa, la bamba, que calor to bring some flavor to the activities.

I hope you enjoyed my suggestions, please post your comments and suggestions.

Claudia Krusch

EasyLearn Programs

Director

-For more information on summer language programs, call 856-848-8870 or log on www.easylearnlanguages.com