Tuesday, January 1, 2008

Kick Off the New Year with Fun and Easy Ways to Learn Spanish!

Happy New Year! ¡Feliz Año Nuevo!

As I spend this week preparing Spanish lesson plans for my children, I thought I'd share this article with you. It gives advice on what to look for when shopping around for language programs for your children. Enjoy!

Introducing your child to a new language with Boca Beth is fun and easy: "New Year - New Language - New Benefits for Your Child
Presented by Beth Butler/Creator of the BOCA BETH Program

Remember those language learning labs in junior high school? Those labs with headsets, the classrooms with written workbooks full of verb conjugation and a teacher who followed a curriculum vs. her students' capabilities combined to create absolutely the worst (and least) effective method used to teach a second language. That is why those of us who took languages back in the days of middle school being called junior high school remember just a few choice words (and probably pronounce them incorrectly!).

Today, as parents and as educators, we know the importance of raising our children to be bilingual. We see and experience this ever-shrinking world of ours and encounter endless opportunities to test our own bilingual skills. We know from recent research and the barrage of studies thrown at us that the secret to success is introducing the new language early in life. Why, even TIME and NEWSWEEK Magazines ran feature articles on the window of opportunity to introduce a new language is between birth and around the age of ten to twelve." (Read more)

1 comment:

Boca Beth said...

Boca Beth here - thanks Jessica for sharing my article about making the commitment to introduce a second language to your child. Though the debate rages on as to the length of time it takes for a person to become fully bilingual (the range is 5 years to 8 years within the debate!!!!), the key is to start early.

We share tons of free resources on our web site if you wish to visit it sometime soon, with free samples of our Spanish/English music for children, movies with BOCA the hand puppet as the maestro/teacher, and bilingual coloring pages.

Making it fun and easy for the English speaking parents and teachers is my goal as a mom of three raising her children to be bilingual!

Happy Educating! ¡Sea feliz educando!

Beth Butler
Founder of www.bocabeth.com