Every year we celebrate Cinco de Mayo, this year, though, to spice up our past year activities, so we decided to make some piñatas, which look like Jalapeño Peppers! Click Here to see what our craft will look like!
We will dance the Mexican hat dance and play a pin the tail on the donkey, a very Mexican looking one! 🙂 Children love music and games and there is no fiesta without them!
Always finish the party with a good story time, so we will be reading this book talking about all the differences between parties in Latin countries and in the US!
Hope you enjoyed our suggestions and share more ways to enjoy Cinco de Mayo at your classes and your home!
I am a confessed bookworm, as such, I have always kept books on my desk, after my teenage years they came in different languages and to suit my broad taste. I am trying to pass my legacy to my son, we love going to Barnes and Noble and picking out new books and he has a reading chart where he gets a new toy for every 30 days of reading!
Since books have been my best friend for as long as I can remember, they taught me so much! Made who I am! I owe my books so much! The fact that I am able to read English, German, Spanish and Portuguese classics in its original language is a priceless gift!
When planning my classes, I try to bring the joy to the children, specially the ones who can’t read yet, because I can’t always find Spanish and Portuguese books to match my units, but I can always find an English one and read them my way!
I have been using story time as one of the components for my class planning for as early as I can remember!
The key is to reduce Spanish Classics to meet baby’s short attention spam and one sentence page for toddlers is a must! After all, if you wish to make the experience fun, you must cater to your audience, otherwise the children will associate reading with BORING and my program is called Spanish made fun, not Spanish made boring!
So, I wanted to share some tips on how to make story time a powerful tool in your foreign language classroom, at your home, in your library story time, anywhere!
Chose the right book! Depending on what you trying to accomplish, your thematic unit or the age or all the above!!!
Reduce the amount of reading to suit your audience, early ages, short one word-3 word sentences, words will increase with age!
Pictures will help children understand your story better, so definitely lots of pictures when reading in a foreign language to non native speakers.
Bring stories which speak to their lives, to the things they know and love! Authentic shouldn’t always mean foreign, should mean close to their heart! I am against the thought that only authentic literature should be used when teaching a language.
This Holiday I changed my plans made in the summer for my holiday unit and incorporated the elf, el duende! Brought my story time to a whole new level, connected to the children like never before and brought the Spanish closer to their heart, so mission accomplished! I used the book The Elf on a Shelf™ in Spanish
I paired the book, which can only be found at Target online, with hide and seek, tell the elf (since he can’t talk) what you want for Christmas and Elf chat activities! My Spanish elf came in a darker color which creates a conversation about ethnicity I would never be able to bring to the classroom, if I did not have my special friend! Shared, that different is beautiful and we are all beautiful, no matter what language we speak!
I hope you enjoy our ideas and that you make the great decision to bring books when teaching a foreign language, it will inspire children to read, will open the doors to the fact that books speak that language as well, increase vocabulary and bring the fun to a whole new level!
Off course we talked about advent and Los Reyes in our Spanish classes and the shoes in Portuguese ones, but the elf was definitely the highlight and resulted that I was invited to read the story 1000+ children in December, in the most popular Santa story times in our area, so it is all about sharing bilingual love!
Hope you enjoyed my thoughts on using story time to teach or bring a foreign language to children and get your book, elf, out of your shelf and use it in your next bilingual experience!
This week some of our classes had the theme Ropas, we started by learning basic vocabulary:
Vestido – dressPantalones – pants
Shortes/bermudas – shorts
Falda – skirt
Camisa – shirt
Blusa – blouse
Zapatos – shoes
Sandalias – sandals
We then worked on drawing clothes for our ninos y ninas:
The results were amazing and they took home versions which could be altered to review other clothing vocabulary.
Some of the samples below were done by 3/4 year olds!
We played a hide and seek game with clothing items where they won a point if they shouted the name of the item. Encontre la camisa!
We looked at two pictures of a boy and a girl at the beach and talked about what they were wearing. Me gusta el sombrero, no me gustan las sandalias…..
We watched el negro cirilo pro Guia Infantil:
We ended the class looking at what we were wearing and talking about it!
Hope you enjoyed our class! Please let us know! if you wish to download a free coloring page, please click here!
This past week, we brought a very interesting approach to teaching furniture vocabulary in Spanish.
Children talked about their favorite rooms in their house, using the words learned, they also played domino and go fish with our flashcards.
They played hit or miss with a ball around the room, hitting the pictures that they could identify and watched a great video of the bear in the big blue house, welcoming them to his house!
Our coloring page was a furniture piece in different classes, coloring pages, flashcards and domino are available for sale, please contact us for sample!
I worked a lot to plan the activities for our cinco de mayo classes this week, because I was tired of the same old…..muy cansada! I also grabbed some special ideas to do at home, since the date is on Saturday this year!
I am using the book Fiesta, which I have used before, but with a new spin, I take them through the Mexican Village to celebrate it the old way, the way small Villages still celebrate it! Come and join us!
So we travel through small town markets, looking at toys, games, we make anillos and exchange them for the ocho anillos game! We tried 8 instruments which are shown in the book and I purchased to bring to our classes, the children loved it, the challenge was to find Spanish names for some of them, like the rain shaker! We danced around the hat using La Bamba! Last but not least we look at the piñata and I placed candy, which falls at the end of the class, but we also look at the way they are homemade and serpentinas, we review colors, numbers which are added to the social aspect of the party!
I also show this video which reviews vocabulary as they ispy the video, looking for things we talked about before, I divided them in groups, they became so competitive! You will not believe it! Increible!
Researching good activities for earth day, April 22nd, I did not find out anything I really liked so I worked on some different ideas and totally outside la caja!
I think the vocabulary list should be:
Tierra – Earth, Sol- sun, Nubes- Clouds, Lluvia-Rain, Planta- Plant, Arbol- Tree, Flor-Flower and Aire- Air.
I showed some of my classes those things in their school playgrounds and they had a first hand experience of how to embrace, take care and appreciate madre tierra.
We played Pasa La Tierra game with blue and green small Plastic Balls, where they would pass the oceano y la tierra (which came from coloring page below, which they colored ocean blue and land green). They also alternated between pasa el ocean ( blue Ball) y vivo en la tierra ( green ball).
Looking for new activities to do using the Spring theme, it came to me to use a mural as a backdrop after we teach the new vocabulary or verbs associated to vocabulary learned in previous years by children who have been with us for a longer period of time!
We gave them the vocabulary by talking about season changes and:
Memory Cards with words – Primavera- Spring, Nube – Cloud, Lluvia- rain, Cesped- grass, Flor- flower, Arbol- tree, Mariposa- butterfly.
We also used the book Pedro Conejito to talk about spring words
We gave them stickers and asked them to draw on our wall and table mural, depending on age, they loved it! Some of the pictures are shown here!
Try and let us know how it was, we would love to share your picture!
Today we started from ages 14m-9 year old students and I wanted to share some of the amazing results! Check it out!
I purchased the Eric Carle’s Book! Decided to use it as inspiration for teaching fruits and introducing my Spring Class topics! Well, I started reading the book! stopped before the fruits! I told the children the oruga was hungry! She needed to shout that out, we sang: Yo ten go hambre, Yo tengo hambre! Quiero comida, quiero frutas, with hand motions and the same thing with sed ( thirsty) and quiero agua and jugo! They loved it! We learned, when we ask for food, we say por favor and gracias!
We moved to an oruga game, they needed to crawl like an oruga and eat the fruits on the other side of the room, telling me the name of each fruit they were eating.
We added a coloring page with three apples (manzanas), they would color the apples the oruga would eat and draw the oruga and tell me how many and incorporate color to the apples! They passed with flying colors! Older ones also wrote on the page and filled out with number of apples.
We are spending the whole celebrating Dr Seuss birthday! Even though he is not a South American traditional author, his influence in the American Schools made me take the time plan a special class to celebrate his birthday! I used two books, Un Pez, Dos Peces….and Huevos Verdes con jamon both for sale at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I used the first book and planned a fish class, we went fishing with a plastic fish game with water and a bucket, they needed to go fishing and tell me the size, color and name of the sea creature, we used sea horses, alligators and crabs of different colors. We used pictures of large fish, whales and turtle in the ocean on the floor, they learned nadar, we also used speed and parar to guide movements.
We showed a video of bilingual reading of the books from youtube :
And the song I created: Yo soy un pea, yo soy un pea, yo soy un pez y me gusta nadar….repeat 2x and Nado rapido y despacio, nado rapido y despacio (3x), the kids loved going fast and slow.
We ate colored gold fish, they could eat the ones they could name the colors.
Can’t wait to share this and other class plans on our membership portion of our site which is currently being updated! Stay tuned!
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.
The owner of this website, Claudia Krusch, is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking Easy Learn Languages Blog to Amazon properties including, but not limited to, amazon.com, endless.com, myhabit.com, smallparts.com, or amazonwireless.com.
