[jenny_islander]

I took 12 years of Spanish (mexicano) in public school, got to the point where I was translating poetry and acting as the unofficial TA--and then lost the language over the next mumblety years due to not having any Spanish-speaking friends or access to the kinds of books or music I like in Spanish. So I've been re-acquiring, and updating, my own Spanish while teaching my girls. The following, then, is from the perspective of somebody who has two students on either side of age nine, but also a tiny bit of fluency to fall back on.

After some false starts, I realized that the way to teach it, for my two at least, was to keep it verbal and keep it relevant. I bought the Flip Flop Spanish Word-a-Day Perpetual Calendar by Sra. Goze, but replaced the words for each day and the picture to color with words relevant to our lives and a visual dictionary built from coloring pages printed off the Web. Here's how we do it (this is basically Goze's method):

1. I do a little review of my own when planning the day's lesson ahead of time. WordReference.com is awesome for this--I get to chat with native mexicano speakers! We learn words based around one or two themes at a time, generally planned by the week.

2. We use a system I encountered in higher-level textbooks, in which the students learn a model dialogue and drop in new vocabulary words as they use them. Currently our model dialogues are (excuse the missing Spanish punctuation):

Q: Cual es la fecha de hoy?
A: Hoy es ---- el ----- de -----.

Q: Que tiempo hace?
A: Answer with weather and astronomy (we like skywatching) terms that use hay, hace, or esta'; comment on last night's weather using hubo or estuvo; currently they can handle sentences as complex as Hubo mucha nieve anoche, pero no hay nieve ahora porque esta' lloviendo esta manana.

Our next model dialogue will be about clean and dirty clothes. (I said relevant. )

3. After we say the new word together three times, I model it, and we have about 5 minutes of conversation using existing and new vocabulary.

4. Then Sophia copies the new word from a written model onto a dictionary page and Eva colors or draws the illustration.

5. We end with a review of a set of useful vocabulary words, such as colors, numbers to 20, days of the week, or months of the year.