This year, I decided to try something a bit different to teach my kids Spanish!

We are in year four of homeschooling, and we have tried many different strategies. My husband and I are both Spanish speakers, and I am a former Spanish Immersion teacher as well. However, it has proved to be more difficult than we thought to incorporate Spanish into our everyday conversation.

You can read more about our past success and blunders, in these posts!

Today, I’d love to give a review of what we are trying fresh this year: the Llamitas Spanish Curriculum. I purchased their preschool morning binder for my son Beau (kindergarten), the Level 1 curriculum for my daughter Emmaline (3rd grade), and the Level 3 curriculum for my son Graham (5th grade). My kids all have varying degrees of Spanish background.

Homeschool Spanish Curriculum

One thing I really love about Llamitas Spanish Curriculum is that it includes art! Level 1 and Level 3 binders both include famous art, and I love this Charlotte-Mason type approach. We love exploring Art History in our homeschool, but doing it in Spanish is a whole different ballgame.

It’s always nice when multiple homeschool subjects coincide! The curriculum includes a few different famous paintings, with comprehension questions and activities. I really love this. It pushes my daughter in new and unexpected ways–and me too, actually! It isn’t often I get to converse about famous art, in Spanish. It is also unique, and not so thematic-based like the rest of the curriculum (not that that’s bad!)

Here is another sample activity from Emmaline’s Level 1 binder. This was a sorting activity, with cutting and pasting.

Typically third graders (her level) are not doing a lot of cutting and pasting anymore. However, while the skill itself is more designed for K-2nd, the content was appropriate, if even a little hard for her!

This is the hard part about a foreign language curriculum–and I think that they strike a great balance. Since there’s no way to know where a child’s language level is, they have generalized levels, which they explain thoroughly in these videos. If you are considering the curriculum, I would highly recommend watching a video or two to see what the best fit would be.

This incongruence of skill, when it comes to language learning, can be tricky to navigate! I wrote about it when I reviewed Llamitas Preschool Binder, here.

Speaking & Listening in Spanish

Along with the activities shown above, the Level 1 curriculum also comes with a mini book that the child reads, in Spanish. It corresponds thematically with the lessons, which is great for repetition and comprehension.

As I mentioned in the Llamitas Preschool Binder review, another strong point of this curriculum is that it is user-friendly, regardless of whether you speak Spanish!

Each week, there are little pronunciation keys, for things as small as syllables or letters–all the way up to full words, phrases, or paragraphs that the student needs to listen to.

The directions are in Spanish–both for the teacher and the student–but they’re translated below, in case you need to read them in English.

There are opportunities for the student to both hear, and practice speaking, Spanish.

Supplemental Spanish Activities

In addition to Emmaline’s Spanish curriculum this year, I also grabbed one of these dollar-store books and started a little narration in there with her. Each time we do Spanish, we write a “Yo veo” (I see) sentence about a room in our home. Yo veo is a theme in the curriculum, so I thought it would be a good idea to expand on it a bit.

We also do occasional activities like verb cards, Spanish slapjack, or Pesca (Go Fish), to keep things varied! (You can view Spanish activities in my TPT store, here).

Some of my favorite free resources for homeschool Spanish include:

• Llamitas Spanish has an awesome freebie library here.
• I also love following Ninos and Nature on Instagram, and her website
• Basho & Friends for great Spanish content: I use his Spotify playlists, as well as YouTube content (posted into a free SafeShare account to skip the ads)

If your kiddo is young and just starting out, I reviewed Beau’s preschool binder, here. Next week I’ll review Graham’s binder–he is using Llamitas Level 3.

How about you – what resources do you love for Spanish?

With love,

Cait