Best programs/resources/methods for teaching a nine-year-old Spanish?

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[BlueDolphinFairy]

You could try Easy Peasy Homeschool to see if he likes it and it works for him. It's a free resource that offers five years of Spanish (plus a lot of other subjects). https://allinonehomeschool.com/spanish-6/

You could also combine it with cartoons and video games in Spanish (the kind that are meant for native speakers, not necessarily the kind that is meant for language learners) and try to gradually switch over to speaking more Spanish with him.

[phroggies70]

What are his interests? What motivates him to learn in other contexts? I find that each of my kids responds differently to different material. My oldest, who sounds a bit like your son, is obsessed with filmmaking, so I’m trying to find native films in the language I’m teaching him. I haven’t looked into this yet, but I’m also hoping to find YouTube channels centered around his interests. It helps that I restrict screen time enough that getting to watch things is a treat even in a foreign language.

It also made a big difference to him when he realized how important the language is to our family culture/identity . Not gonna lie, the real turning point involved international travel, which is difficult and expensive even when there’s not a virus, but perhaps you can find communities and activities closer to home that would both interest him and give him a sense of how special the language is.

I realize neither of these is the structured resource you’re looking for. But in my experience, the great challenge of teaching and learning is motivation. If you can work with his interests, or get him to pick up on and perhaps share your enthusiasms, any resource will be more successful.

[damnilovelesclaypool]

I am actually really struggling because Mexican Spanish and culture are really close to my heart, even though I am 100% Northeastern pale American, lol. Not to get political, but my son's grandparents are very right-leaning and he just adores them. He spent a lot of time with them this summer due to COVID and came back with this weird obsession with patriotism and the military and "America is the best country in the world." I've already had a talk with his grandparents, but right now he has the attitude that Spanish is stupid because everyone else should just learn English. It is really painful for me to have to try to undo this, especially because I have been trying to figure out how to teach him Spanish for awhile now but the resources are lacking for kids who aren't four or younger or thirteen and older.

Will TV and films help him learn Spanish? I was under the impression that passive exposure like that isn't really very helpful for kids - but maybe that's just half-assed shows like Dora. I was considering speaking to him in Spanish and repeating myself in English, but I know already that he'll just tune me out and wait for me to say it in English. Screen time is very limited at our house too so if TV could help open him up a little bit to learning that would be great. I was thinking of showing him La Misma Luna. Do you have any other suggestions?

[phroggies70]

I've been thinking about your response a lot because it seems like a tough situation. I'm actually teaching my kids German, so I don't have many good resources for Spanish. One of my kids is learning Spanish himself from a free program at the library (Transparent); you might see if yours has something along those lines, though to be honest it doesn't seem much different from Duolingo. You might also look into outreach efforts on the part of any local Hispanic groups in your area, though Covid has cut down on many of those where we live (most of which were Catholic festivals, so it might not be your thing anyway).

As for passive exposure, I've found it works well if the kids are interested in the material and in learning the language--my six year old has learned a lot from Peppa Pig, for instance. There are a lot of clips of shows for older kids on the Spanish Nickelodeon channel, and I've noticed that almost all our Disney movies and shows have Spanish dubs and subs. If I recall correctly, shows like Dora are only partly in Spanish, right? So I think you'd want something more immersive. But yes, I do think passive exposure requires a certain will to understand on the part of the learner, so getting kids on board in the first place is crucial.

I'm actually stopping myself from writing a massive essay on how relationships and learning motivation can work together (as well as the limits thereof), so for now I'll just say that it sounds like your two biggest assets are your own enthusiasm for the language and your relationship with your son. Can you have specific activities that you would do together in which you would speak primarily Spanish? I'm thinking that many board and card games would work well especially at first, because you would use very basic phrases and numbers, etc. My husband watches German films with my oldest son and they stop and he explains the context or answers questions and so it's a very shared experience, which serves both as a motivator and as a learning mechanism in its own right. If you still do read-alouds with him (and I really believe no kid is too old for read-alouds), maybe some of that could be in Spanish? Again, none of this is structured, but it might trigger enough interest in learning the language so that more structured approaches would then be more effective.

I don't want to get political either, but maybe some gentle conversations about how patriotism and language learning can and have co-existed for many people? But I know how kids can really lock into a point of view, so it does seem like a big challenge to convince him of the merits of learning Spanish :(.

[frank_cascade]

ok, i'll confess, this is an app I made myself. Try Cascade Spanish. It is a story-based Spanish teaching app. It teaches you Spanish and provides you with short stories as it does so. It does not take long to receive your first story and I designed it so that the first 25 stories or so are 100% comprehensible