Our "foreign language" has been a pretty different this year, since in March we moved to Ecuador. This being the case, a lot of our kids' Spanish curriculum is supplied for free by the neighbor kids who ring the doorbell at least three times a day to see if our kids are done with school YET (or nap, or supper, or you-name-it) and can come downstairs and play soccer. :P However, we have still tried to do a little on-purpose Spanish in "school time. Note, that if you know me at all, you know I keep a pretty loose line between "school" and the rest of life, but even so, at least most of the time we know the difference. :)
Recently our Spanish learning has been broken into 3 categories:
-Hymn / Verse Memory
-Lunch table commands
-Bible Story read-aloud
We have been SLOWLY learning a Spanish hymn. At first we picked the first verse apart, talking about main words (nouns and verbs), so that we understood at least for the most part what we were saying. We have been singing all three verses even though we have not yet picked them apart for understanding. I have not yet decided if this is a good thing or not...if you have a thought, feel free to leave me a comment! :) Verses are learned similarly. The whole family works on the same verse, spending the first few days understanding the words. We have been working on verses after supper, so they are not officially part of "school" per say for us.
We found that at least for us, it was more doable to have a "confined" area that was predominately Spanish-speaking. For us, the lunch table works well. The we say what we're putting on their plate in Spanish, and they ask for more in Spanish. If they don't remember what it is called, they know to ask, "que es esto?" (what is this) and point. At first they only used the few standard phrases they had learned, but as they learn more words and hear us string familiar words together in different ways, they are beginning to branch out.
We are really enjoying Historias Favoritas de la Biblia by Ura Miller. (You can purchase it from Amazon here.) There are several things that I really like about using this book. First of all, each Bible account is only one page long. This seems to be plenty for my crew to focus on and keeps us on track. The opposite page has three questions about the reading. (It's been very helpful for me to have the questions supplied in simple but correct Spanish.) I also absolutely LOVE the illustrations in this book! They are clear and well done, and my favorite, the Lord looks very much like his followers; Hebrew, not stained-glass European. :D My little boys don't attempt to answer the questions, though they do sit with us during the reading just to get an "ear" for it. After my daughter answers her questions, the boys tell me things they see in the picture. Example: I might ask them in Spanish what is blue in the picture? What is green? What else they see in this picture. My three year old does a lot of pointing and a few one word answers, but is five year old brother is starting to use more words.
I realize our case is not standard, (in that we have the choice to immerse our kids in the language they are learning), but I hope some of the in-the-house activities might still prove worth pondering.
