Friday 12 February 2021

Charlotte Mason Simple Spanish - a Curriculum for Young children

 It has been very encouraging to see new business ventures emerge within the home education movement in recent years. Downloadable products are especially helpful to those outside of the USA who pay a premium for postage and this format lends itself well to learning another language. 

Charlotte Mason Simple Spanish is a Curriculum for teaching Spanish to young children. So far the author has downloadable resources that may be used with very young children to help expose them to the language and also for Year 1. She is planning a Year 2, a program that will focus on learning to read Spanish as well as introducing copywork and dictation to learn to write Spanish and will be following the Scope and Sequence of the PNEU (scroll down) for formal lessons and for when to introduce reading and writing.  

The author recommends the lessons be woven into your days, e.g. the poetry informal lesson could be done during tea time, the challenge (replacing an English sentence with Spanish) when they wake up and so on. 

For the early years, two lessons of five minutes a week where the child learns a very short song for a month through play and exploration is suggested.

For the formal lessons for Year 1, two lessons of ten minutes each week are recommended and one ten minute lesson a week for the poetry recital. In addition, a lesson of fifteen minutes a week for song study is suggested.

Audio links to Spanish music, stories, songs, and pronunciation are given via QR codes which are very easy to link to with a mobile phone. Nature walks, poetry and Bible verses are included in each unit.

As you can see, this is a very immersive and gentle method of learning a foreign language which is very consistent with a Charlotte Mason approach.

The home page of the Charlotte Mason Simple Spanish website has a link, Expectations by Age, which has ideas on how to use the curriculum with different ages.

Charlotte Mason Simple Spanish is an economical and attractive curriculum. There are some free resources to download and if you subscribe to the website you get 15% off your order.



3 comments:

mudpuddle said...

what a great idea... other languages are so hard to learn when you get older... i lived in Mexico for a year and took 3 semesters of Spanish in school and still don't speak it very well. it's very hard to understand the various accents for one thing, they talk so fast and slur everything together...

i got the message about gutenberg... and posted a reply which might not help very much... Australia has its own version of Gutenberg which has a very large selection of golden age mysteries as well as many Australian works: very interesting site...

Carol said...

It's so much easier to get an accent correct when you're a lot younger & not so self-conscious!
Thanks for the reply with the instructions. We used to get our out of print kindle versions from Adelaide University over here but they closed their online library off to the public after having it available for some years. I was so disappointed!

mudpuddle said...

why would they do that? large organizations sometimes seem to purposely do things that are contrary to their expressed intent... like universities banning access to books... what?!!