Top Ways to Incorporate Learning Spanish into Your Daily Family Routine

Life is BUSY. It's so hard these days to find even a little bit of down time in the schedule, and adding even one more thing on can seem impossible. Trust me, I know this from experience! Thankfully, learning Spanish doesn't have to be like this! If you are intentional about it, it can be integrated seamlessly into your current family routine and your child will learn so much while you hardly notice you are adding something in.

1. First and foremost, learn WITH your child. Get involved and get excited about it with them! They will get so much joy from the fact that mom or dad, grandma or grandpa, or anyone else is getting involved in the learning process. You will also find that you benefit from and enjoy it!

2. Choose several of the most common phrases that you use with your child (commands, places, activities etc), and start incorporating the Spanish version alongside the English version as you think of it throughout your day.

3. When you are walking somewhere with your child--point out the Spanish names to things along your path. Example: If you see a tree, excitedly say árbol!", bird "pájaro", etc. Or, even better, ask them what it is and have them name the object if they know it already!

4. Make it FUN! More on this in a future post!

5. Research the names of some of their favorite objects in Spanish, such as a ball, a stuffed animal, a blanket, or another toy. Say it to them when that object is involved in your daily life, and try to see if you can get them to say it back to you!

6. Kids at a very young age will learn Spanish in a very similar way to the way they learned English. Exposure is key. And, no matter what age a child is, the more exposure the better! You can find hundreds of books for kids, TV shows, videos, songs, and other things to incorporate into your repertoire and options for your kids. It will amaze you how quickly your children will pick words and phrases up from these!

7. Finally, especially with older children, ask them simple questions in Spanish. You can start with "Coómo está?", "How are you?", and "Cómo fue tu día?", "How was your day?" after school. Not only are these great conversation starters, but they are great phrases to start sprinkling into your routine and familiarizing your family with.

8. Ask them what they are learning about in school, and then learn how to talk about those subjects in Spanish together! This is a great way to connect Spanish to daily life, and reinforce their school content while also increasing their Spanish vocabulary. I will be talking about some of my favorite resources for this in a future post.