How I'm Teaching Spanish (without actually knowing Spanish myself)

Not only is foreign language a recommended component of a CM homeschool, but I believe it to be a worthwhile pursuit for anyone. In fact, I wrote an essay about it in high school; I signed up for my University's very first Spanish course ever offered; and I went to study at the Universidad de Guanajuato in Mexico for a month. Sadly, I have forgotten far more Spanish than I actually know. However, since I know more Spanish than any other language (besides English, obviously) and since we live in Texas, Spanish seemed like the obvious choice for our first foreign language pursuit in homeschooling. (Yes, I said "first." Students in Charlotte Mason's schools often became not just bilingual but multilingual! We'll see how we do with that.)

Last year, I purchased a Spanish book that I thought would mimic the methods used in CM schools the most.

Speaking Spanish with Miss Mason and François employs Gouin series to teach language. When using Gouin series, you generally teach the kids a sequence of actions along with simple sentences that match the action. Once they know that sequence, you teach it to them in Spanish (or French or whatever language you're working on). You focus especially on the verbs, simplifying down to just the verb and coming back to the whole sentence, and you can add in questions to the students about what they are doing. We only managed to stick with this method for 2 weeks. It could be a lovely method, and as I flip through the book again today, I see many helpful additional exercises and recitations. However, to me, it felt contrived and stagnant. I quickly began to look for alternatives, and I discovered that there are questions about whether CM continued to endorse Gouin series as a primary foreign language teaching tool her whole career or not. (It's nice to see that even famous educators changed things!)

As I was pondering how to teach my 3 young children (who were 4, 5, and 7 at that time) Spanish, I realized that I actually knew a great deal about teaching young children a language. I used to be a Speech-Language Pathologist who worked with preschoolers! I knew about language development. I started thinking about common "tools of the trade," so to speak, in teaching language to youngsters. I started using Spanish nursery rhymes, simple Spanish children's books from the library, and songs. 

I stumbled across this used copy of Tortillitas Para Mama online (probably during a search for books by Barbara Cooney), and Brown Bear, Brown Bear is a classic book to use for early language learning!

The kids have especially loved this Spanish equivalent to "I'm a Little Teapot."

This route for teaching a new language felt natural and alive to me, much like a language should feel! However, it started to become more and more difficult to gather enough material to use for each school day this way. So, again, I started to look for something more.

Eventually, I stumbled across someone online talking about free, online Salsa episodes from Georgia Public Broadcasting that were designed specifically for teaching Spanish to kids from kindergarten through third grade. Eureka! There was a freely available resource that might work? I had to look into it! I discovered that there were 42 Salsa episodes (about 14 minutes each) that utilized traditional children's tales like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Each episode was fully in Spanish, providing an immersive approach, and Wyoming public schools had created a classroom curriculum guide for using these Spanish episodes that was also freely available online. It seemed like a great match for us. I cannot provide any sort of immersive or fluent Spanish experience on my own for my children with my limited knowledge of Spanish, but these episodes could do that. I watched one for myself and liked what I saw, so I decided to try it with the kids. It was a hit!

We began to watch one single episode 2-3 times per week, ending the week with an attempt to act out a scene or more from the episode. (The Salsa site provides a script for each episode along with the English translation of the episode.) The kids were hesitant to attempt saying any of the Spanish words after me at first during this re-enactment, but after a few weeks, they did this quite readily. I used the Wyoming guides to notice what key vocabulary was emphasized in each episode, and I started slipping in more Spanish words and phrases around the time we'd watch each episode. After a few weeks of this, I noticed the kids were starting to slip Spanish words into their talk with each other too. 

This year, we're still working our way through Salsa episodes. For the first couple weeks of this school year, we skipped the end-of-the-week reenactments as I felt we were all a bit rusty on Spanish, but we'll be incorporating that again starting tomorrow (hopefully). We also try to review the key vocabulary more formally once a week, do some kind of activity with the new vocabulary for the week (like having a tea party in Spanish to practice "por favor," "gracias," and "de nada"), review our Spanish songs, and work on a new Spanish song.  I imagine I'll squeeze some more Spanish or bilingual children's books in here and there too that fit with whatever we're learning that week.  I think these methods will hold us over pretty well for the remainder of this school year, and I figure I can see where we all stand then before trying to figure out what the next year's Spanish learning might look like. 

Here is a shot from the resource available from Wyoming that helps me keep track of the focus vocabulary per episode particularly.

This shows a page of script from the first episode with English in the left column and the Spanish to the right.

This sheet also came from the Wyoming resource. It was a good reminder to me that I could be giving directives in Spanish during our Spanish lessons!

This is an example of one of the pages I put together using clip-art found online to help us formally practice the past focus vocabulary.