Month: June 2022

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Teacher Tooltip Tuesday: While you are taking a break this summer, try a new Spanish for kids app to offer you a break throughout the school year, too!

It’s summer, and you are on vacation by now, hopefully! Time to take a break! A break is exactly what I invite you to consider in your curriculum planning for next year! Take a look at the features of a state-of-the-art Spanish for kids app called FL4K, to ease your workload and engage your students in learning Spanish in a challenging, engaging, and extremely innovative way.

Why choose FL4K?

There is no program that will supplant the importance of the teacher that reinforces the concepts taught online with hands-on activities, projects, pair activities, etc. Students always need a variety of activities to practice the real-world language skills that they will be learning with this Spanish for kids app.

Nevertheless, FL4K, a Spanish for kids app, includes Spanish games specifically designed to build language proficiency, dialogues with built-in language lab features, practice questions with images, audio, and instant feedback to delight kids and reinforce learning!

Cultural Activities

This Spanish for kids app also includes a culture program that teaches students about eight different Hispanic cultures using carefully scaffolded language structures that build language proficiency.

The app allows students to progress at their own rate, reading and listening about all the fascinating points of interculturality designed and developed by a team of teachers with over 100 years of combined experience in the classroom.

Students will discover interesting facts about the geography and climate, people, sites of interest, native animals, foods, indigenous groups, global challenges, etc. of each culture.

Culture and Language Learning Together

While they are learning about Hispanic culture, they are being challenged to build their language proficiency skills. Instead of learning Spanish in a vacuum, students are learning about cultures and language at the same time. The language learning is so subtle and natural that the students aren’t even aware of how successfully they are building language proficiency.

Three levels into the program, most of the language is in the target language because of how practical language is so carefully and repetitively embedded in the program.

We are a dedicated group of teachers and techies working to provide you with a Spanish program that has done all the hard work for you: we put all the resources that you and your students need into a single platform at your fingertips, plan lessons so you won’t have to, and provide the flexibility to teach however works best for you!

We want you and your students to be excited to start Spanish class in the fall with renewed ideas for how to make learning fun and much easier on you! Take a look and let us know what you think!

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Whether you are teaching children or adults, vocabulary needs to be taught according to a communicative hierarchy and in a context. In other words, you need to teach chunks of language that lend themselves to helping students be successful at speaking Spanish in the real world. 

Outdated textbooks provide long lists of isolated vocabulary and grammatical structures, NOT functional language. In addition, teachers (sadly) aren’t trained in building proficiency skills that will serve their students in actually using the target language to communicate. 

Haven’t you heard many language students complain about how they studied a language for years and can’t say a word? This is the result that we want to avoid in teaching a world language! 

So, how do you determine what structures and easy Spanish vocabulary words to teach kids for practical use? 

Think about chunks of language that students need to function like:  Where is it? (¿Dónde está?), I like that (Me gusta); I am thirsty/hungry/tired/hot/cold (Tengo sed/hambre/sueño/calor/frío); I want… (Quiero); I have…(Tengo). 

The truth of the matter is that teachers need to be trained in the basics of how to assess language proficiency according to ACTFL oral proficiency standards. Once a teacher understands the criteria for the levels of development from Novice to Advanced, the process of teaching becomes much more effective. 

If a teacher has a group of beginning Spanish students (Novice Low), he/she needs to be able to assess what students CAN DO at this level and know what they should be able to do in order to move to the next level of proficiency (Novice Mid). 

Once the teacher is adept at identifying the skills required for each level (can do’s), the teacher can begin to teach more intentionally with concrete goals for the students to move them forward on the proficiency continuum. 

Training is the key! 

Easy Spanish vocabulary words to teach kids include putting the easy Spanish words in meaningful contexts that help students to become more communicative. It is a bit of an art to teach this way and totally wreaks havoc with traditional methods. 

The strength of this kind of teaching, however, is that students start developing confidence and skills right away. They no longer memorize long lists of vocabulary, prove their skills with grammar quizzes, and promptly forget everything. No! They practice speaking every day using functional chunks of language. Finally, proficiency is not based on talent, but on practice and hard work, the result of which is a practical skill. 

Language learning is for everyone, not just the gifted and talented.  

As a retired Spanish teacher trained in ACTFL oral proficiency standards, I began working for a company (fl4k.com) that was already doing a great job of teaching easy Spanish vocabulary words to kids within a context through videos, games, and practice questions, with hands-on activities. 

What was missing was the interculturality piece, so a team of teachers who are trained in teaching language according to proficiency standards gathered to inform the company about how to do this best. We have created a culture program that provides fascinating content about nine different Spanish-speaking cultures all presented to kids in a single interactive digital platform that includes dialogues with recording features, practice questions, real-time polling, and features carefully scaffolded language structures and vocabulary in a context. 

Even though the program includes a lot of bells and whistles that appeal to kids of all ages, the best feature of the program is the emphasis on helping students build language proficiency that lasts and actually functions. The easy Spanish vocabulary words to teach kids are all embedded in cultural posts in a social media-like format that is very appealing to the Gen Z student! 

The easy Spanish vocabulary is given context and therefore becomes memorable. Students need to learn to ask questions (Who?/¿Quién?; What?/¿Qué?; Where?/¿Dónde?; When?/¿Cuándo?; Why? /¿Por qué?; How?/¿Cómo?; How much?/¿Cuánto?) and connect sentences (and/y; also/también; however/sin embargo; therefore/por lo tanto; because/porque, etc. 

Sailing through textbooks with complicated grammar formulas and having students memorize long lists of words just are not an effective way to TEACH students to actually speak another language with lasting results. 

Check out what we are doing at FL4K to help you help your students truly learn to speak another language.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Summer is almost here! Downtime is on the way! Refresh, relax, and find ways to enrich your interculturality curriculum! Is this often an afterthought that finally you need to do something about this summer?

Don’t reinvent the wheel

I am part of a teacher team that is creating an interculturality curriculum that can supplement any Spanish language program K-12. Imagine what fun it is after 43 years in the classroom to help write about Hispanic culture in the most appealing way possible for Gen Z students.

That’s right! This is an interactive digital platform with real-time polls, discussion questions, built-in language lab recording features, and social media-like posts that feature super fascinating intercultural information about nature, art, music, local artists and citizens, sites of interest, history, global challenges, adventures, etc., all with Novice-Intermediate language carefully scaffolded using high-frequency language that is repeated and repeated until it is like second nature for kids to use the target language naturally.

How long does the program take to work through?

Each level of study includes 40-50 intercultural social media-like posts that are short paragraphs about high-interest topics for kids of all ages. There are corresponding interactive practice questions and dialogues,  games specifically designed to build language proficiency, hands-on activities, discussion questions, music, recipes, and pertinent videos with each level of study.

Of the eight levels (Hispanic countries) in the program, a teacher could get through 3 to 4 maximum in a year, depending on the number of contact hours/per week in their school’s language program.

A Flex program for lower elementary students, for example, would only be able to tackle 2 to 3 of the cultural units in a year while a Spanish I and II class at the middle or high school level might be able to complete four units of study, two per semester.

The all-in-one tool for your teacher toolkit

The coolest part about our program is that it includes a curriculum guide, is customizable, is ACTFL aligned, and it is not a textbook! It is all in a single digital platform.

At the very least, check it all out at our website: fl4k.com, and see how we are trying to create the program that we have always wanted ourselves with the intention of saving you time – while at the same time ensuring that your curriculum is interculturally rich and engaging for students today!

Don’t reinvent the wheel this summer! Study our website and see what might work best for you! Reach out to us and schedule a demo or sign up for our free summer trial! Check out the perks for signing up now!