Spanish For You- Estaciones

My kids enjoy learning Spanish so we are always looking for new ways to incorporate it into our days. We recently had the chance to review Spanish For You, specifically the Estaciones package (estaciones which means "seaons") This package covers vocabulary & grammar for the calendar & weather, fall & school, winter, spring & summer.

This is a year long curriculum that contains between 24-30 weeks of lesson plans meant to be used 4 times a week. It's available in either book form or download. Not only are lesson plans included, but you also get PDF downloads of audio files of pronunciations, worksheets, flash cards, game suggestions as well as other activities.

I appreciate that all the work is done for you so all you have to do is implement it (I am all about saving myself work!) While I do have a background in Spanish, having the audio files is beneficial for the words I don't remember but also the way this curriculum is laid out, any parent could teach this even if they had never heard a word of Spanish before.

Because this is a multi-grade curriculum, I was able to use this for all of my grade school children which is always a plus in my book. The levels are broken down into grades 3-4, 5-6 and 7-8. We used each of these levels. Some of the kids daily lessons were similar but also varied a bit. The older kids were able to work on their lessons independently with little help from me.

While you can certainly take your time in going through this curriculum (stretching out the daily lessons if more time is needed), you do need to follow it in the order that it is laid out in as each lesson builds upon the previous ones. We printed out the flashcards that had pictures & then wrote the spanish & english words on the back. My kids enjoyed "quizzing" each other with these.

I also printed out their weekly lesson plans, which were very simply laid out, that listed what each grade was to work on each day.  Then I printed out the activity sheets that went along with each day. Some days we did the optional work that was suggested but not always depending on our day. It took the kids 15-30 minutes to work through the daily lessons. They found that they picked up on the words & phrases quite easily from the repetition & fun activities (word searches, fill in the blanks, etc) I liked that they were learning more than just vocabulary but also phrases & conjugation.

This is a great curriculum to use for teaching multiple grades at one time. It would even work well for a co-op. Check out some of the free samples for Estaciones. This curriculum package is intended for grades 3-8 and costs $64.95 for the entire package.