Valentine’s Day in Brazil is in June, so I usually do the regular Valentine’s Celebrations in February and again in the Portuguese classes in June! In Brazil Valentin’s Day, Dia dos namorados is a celebration for lovers, couples only, no friendship, just love.

My favorite Bilingual Books:

Be Mine – Brenda Ponnay

Primer Dia de San Valentin  de Clifford

Dora Quiere Mucho a Boots

El Primer Beso de Froggy

Feliz Dia de La Amistad, Gus

We are making Butterflies with candy:

• We are teaching love, hugs, kisses, smile as vocabulary and they will see the pic behind a hear and have to say what it is in Spanish or Portuguese.
• The more advanced students will receive a blank cardstock and make pics for the front and write simple sentences inside, I will be posting later pics of what they did!

Wanted to share this link from Mommy Maestra for Valentine’s Cards:

http://www.mommymaestra.com/2012/02/bilingual-valentines-day-cards-for.html

• I will also use a heart shaped basket and they would throw colored hearts in it to review colors!
• We will be making a love tree and placing shapes on the tree which is pink and we call it árbol del amor, Árvore de Amor.

Feliz Dia de San Valentin! Happy Valentine’s Day! Feliz Dia dos Namorados!

Claudia Krusch

Director

It’s that time of year and you are thinking, how can I sneak in some bilingual toys and make my child enjoy it and help him/her learn a foreign language at the same time???

Well, I looked around and will share some of my favorites!

Books:

Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other book stores have a whole section of Spanish, French, Chinese or bilingual versions of classics like Dr. Seuss and others, so if you like adding books to your child’s list, this is a favorite way to share great moments and bring some bilingual fun to your child’s bed time or reading time!

I did not find Christmas Classics in foreign languages available in bookstores, trust me, I looked for it, but I believe you should look at your child’s preferences and classic stories. I wanted to share my activity book, which combines a cd which reads the story in both languages and suggestions on activities in each page!

http://www.easylearnlanguages.com/products.html

Many other options are out there like Dora™, Curious George™,  and Other famous characters books!

You can also download them in your tablet or computer and have a paperless version of them or do a surprise dowload to your child’s tablet! My son loves comic books and character books, I have found some of his favorites in Portuguese and will download them into his tablet before Christmas!

Itunes has so many options!

Music

It’s always a great way to connect with children! The holidays bring the magic of showing children favorite tunes in different languages!

I have this cd and we always play it on weekends and when we are decorating the tree!

http://www.amazon.com/Feliz-Navidad-Christmas-Songs-Spanish/dp/B000FI8LW6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1349627481&sr=8-1&keywords=christmas+songs+in+spanish

I have a Brazilian Cd with songs in Portuguese with the character Monica, a famous comic book character in Brazil, but I could not find the link to share, I have found this one, not sure why it so hard to find music in Portuguese when you are here in the US! Sharing the songs and culture like the fact that South American countries don’t have stockings but shoes where Santa brings the toys and other traditions I will be sharing in a later post, will bring your child to a magic new world where America traditions are added to the new ones! Priceless!

http://musicabrasileira.org/brasilianchristmas/

 Movies

Basically any movie you purchase nowadays, has the Spanish and French options, so your child can watch the movie in a foreign language. I would recommend showing them the movie in English first, unless they are totally fluent in the second language. You would be surprised how children sit down and watch the elf, Christmas Carol and Mr Magoo in Spanish and love it!  Brazil has a different zone for movies, so I purchase my dvds there when I go or in the sendex.net store and load to my laptop as they will not play on my blueray/dvd player!

Toys

Dora, Elmo, Diego, so many toys are now offered with bilingual versions, Dora has a new gymnastics doll which sings in Spanish! So cute!

Clothes

I ordered a shirt on vista print, it is green, long sleeve and it says Feliz Natal! Every year we have a tradicion to wake up in new jammies on Christmas morning and I ordered this shirt for $ 15,00 with the printing in red and will buy the pj bottoms and surprise my son with it! You can also place granparents pics and saying in a foreign language if your in laws or parents are from a foreign country or make the shirt your child/children’s pic in it, place the Merry Christmas in their native language and ship as a Christmas gift! Shipping of a shirt to a country like Brazil is only $ 4,50!

After all, it’s all about bringing the holiday cheer to your children, making the foreign language, a part of it!

Claudia Krusch

CEO of EasyLearn Languages

This week we brought an amazing summer class with animals and beach vocabulary!

The children reviewed their animal vocabulary and the animals were placed en la playa! 

We reviewed and introduced in other classes the vocabulary:

Beach – playa

Sun- sol

Sand- arena

Sand castle – Castillo de arena

In different situations they needed to look at the book let me know where the animals were….or what was the animal doing??

The book below has some great pictures:

We also looked the video and listened to the song, the children loved it!