Español Made Easy

Scarlett can count to ten. In Spanish. And we didn’t teach her. Dora did. We certainly recognize the importance of multiple communication paths around here--Scarlett hears different versions of words all the time and we weren’t surprised when she readily picked up sign language as an infant--but it caught me off guard when she busted from uno to diez without any formal coaching from us. Miss Explorer and her crew did a bang-up job of doing their job--the kid knows English…and Spanish, too. How ‘bout you? So, keeping with this new-found ability, I’ve been trying to give her more Spanish vocabulary, at least as much as I know from growing up in California. And it seems to be working. When I told her that a little girl at dance class had a “mariposa” barrette in her hair, I heard Scarlett behind me in the carseat repeating it to herself for storage and retrieval. Then she started whispering, “abra open, cierra closed.” I guess she figured she would pull out all the stops since she was on a roll. It’s pretty fascinating to watch how effortless the process is when it is allowed to progress naturally stress-free. And I guess it makes sense--to small people, every word sounds like a foreign language at first. Susan Middleton Elya decided to make basic Spanish vocabulary fun to learn in her engaging rhyming book Say Hola To Spanish. It’s such a good time, we read it three times. Or should I say tres veces?


http://www.amazon.com/Hola-Spanish-Susan-Middleton-Elya/dp/1880000644

http://www.susanelya.com/files/home.htm