Spanish Plan: Advancing Beginners to Intermediate

The Kid now has a pretty good Spanish vocabulary including many nouns, quite a few adjectives, and a solid handful of verbs. She understands that verbs are conjugated differently in Spanish and has started learning how to change the verb to match the noun. She has mastered the content of introductory curriculum and because there isn't an intermediate curriculum written for young children, we are leaving curriculum behind this year. We are essentially about to start the second year of a three-year plan to become conversational in Spanish.

Resources for this year:

Salsa Spanish. I had almost dismissed this as being "too easy", but upon rewatching I realized how much vocabulary and sentence structure is in the conversation. The focus words are certainly simple (basic numbers, colors, and nouns) but using the scripts I can come up with quite a bit of new material for us.

Spanish books. I bought a box of 50 Spanish books written at a kindy-1st grade level from Scholastic. We've started reading through these. The plan is to add one new book from the box to our bookshelves each week, carefully looking up the words we don't know. Then we take one of the older (and simpler) books each week to practice reading fluency. The reading fluency book is read a few times throughout the week - first to remember the story and vocabulary, then to listen carefully to the sounds, then for The Kid to read aloud to me once or twice.

Spanish music. This will include children's music like the stuff from Jose-Luis Orozco as well as just having a Pandora station full of Spanish-language pop music.

YouTube. There's quite a lot here. Plaza Sesamo is as good a place to start as any!

DuoLingo. I use this for myself. The Kid tried it last year and it moved too fast for her, but it is a little more manageable now. We'll still be going through at a snail's pace, but it includes a variety of exercises.

We've switched a number of iPad apps into Spanish language mode just to continue surrounding ourselves with the language. She also has the BrainPop Espanol app to have another source of hearing Spanish regularly.

And I'm still considering Spanish for Children. If I find we need more structure to our studies, I may add this. If we are making good progress with what we are doing, then I won't.

Immersion. Just as immersion is what moved us from "beginner" to "advanced beginner", I believe that it will take a period of immersion to move us from "advanced beginner" to "intermediate". We are starting to plan a trip to Honduras for February/March 2016.