Spanish.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Spanish — teaching it to the kids, that is.  There’s so much material available for Spanish speakers, and we live in a heavily Spanish-speaking part of town.  It’s the obvious language to do, if we’re going to do a foreign language at all.

Problem:  I don’t know Spanish.

I’d like to learn, though.   I wonder if we could learn it together as a family?

I’m not happy with the "complete curricula" I’ve seen.  Frankly, I’m spoiled.  I studied French off and on in elementary school, took four years in high school, and got a minor in college.  I had excellent teachers, and my high school education in French was very traditional and rigorous:  lots of vocabulary drills, copywork, and translation; journal writing; classes taught mostly in French after the first year.  I keep expecting to be able to find something out there for kids to learn Spanish that reminds me of what I had as a high school student (albeit written for a third- or fifth- grade level).  Haven’t found it.  I am really disappointed, so far, in what’s available for homeschoolers. 

I was a bit tempted to pick up the classroom curriculum that’s used by our parish school, which does Spanish in grades K-6, for no other reason than that I know the other curricula they use are extremely high quality and tend to the classical/traditional style (Saxon Math, for instance, and the Faith and Life series of religion texts from Ignatius Press.)  It’s Viva El Espanol, a McGraw-Hill series.    Unfortunately, it appears to come with a bunch of classroomy educational crap, like an octopus puppet.  Also the descriptions are full of edspeak, like "The Total Physical Response Storytelling (TPRS) technique is now a part of lessons!" Whatever that means.  I don’t suppose I could get away with just using a textbook, or maybe a text plus a teachers’ edition.

I suppose I could start the way I started in French, with a boatload of vocabulary drills.  I remember how helpful the vocabulary drill was back in high school — the eighth-grade "pre-French" year consisted of almost nothing but vocabulary drill and a little bit of conversational stuff.  A bit tedious at times, but having all those vocabulary words at hand really helped when it was time to learn grammar in ninth grade.   Technically, all I need for that is a good dictionary and a stack of 5 x 8 index cards — picture on the front, Spanish word on the back.  I found this website that sells access, $30 for six months, to downloads of 2000 or so clip-art type flash cards.  So for $30 plus the cost of printing and filing I could have a starter kit of 2000 vocabulary words.  It’s hard to beat that.   I tried — there’s lots of "English/Spanish" flash card sets out there, but just about all of them have English words on the front and Spanish on the back (no good for teaching nonreaders — and anyway, forces the learner to "translate" rather than to think in the new language) or English words on the back, Spanish words and pictures on the front. 

So suppose we spend a couple of years just working on vocabulary.  I bet the kids would enjoy learning the Spanish names for colors, animals, various verbs, conversational phrases, and so on.  Maybe during that time a   decent Spanish curriculum for homeschoolers will come along.  In the meantime we can supplement with various videos, multimedia stuff, and the like.  Still, I wish some publisher somewhere would read my mind and put together a program exactly like the one I imagine using in my head.   I just finished phonics — I don’t want to design my own Spanish program unless I absolutely have to!