Speekee Online Spanish for Kids

Details: Speekee Online Spanish Learning Program.  An online program built in 2006 to help children ages 2-11 learn Spanish, with additional resources that are designed specifically for children, with children.  Very interactive with games, songs, dancing, videos, puppets, Muppets, and challenges.  The Speekee Spanish Challenge is the most up to date, current educational comprehensive Spanish program that is online for children.

Disclaimer: I received one or more of the products mentioned above for free using Tomoson.com. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers.

My Review: This is such a fun activity for children to use.  My kids were so excited to have online games to help them learn Spanish.  They watched videos with puppets, Muppets, and children speaking in Spanish.  As a home school teacher, I really like the idea behind this website.  Providing children with more ways to learn a foreign language, giving the children more real life instances to practice their new words, phrases and conversations.  The puppets and Muppets sing silly songs and dance for delightful creative fun with learning Spanish.  Aside from the videos, you can take challenges, sing along with songs, play games, answer questions, etc.  Some times the movies are confusing, they try to teach something that you don't really know, but repetition really helps as does an easy English/ Spanish dictionary.  Some of the puppets/ Muppets voices are really quick or their speech is hard to understand, but I love the idea behind the puppets and Muppets.  Even though most of the time my kids don't know what the kids and characters are saying they love it when they get to play Spanish on the computer.  Its a super cute, fun way to encourage children to learn Spanish, and be able to comfortably communicate with other children and adults in Spanish.  With this being said, I think a few adjustments would be very helpful.  My children can't use this sight on their own, because finding the games, the challenges isn't easy, finding the movies is easy.  It would be nice to have a more child friendly website design.  None of the videos or places on the map are labeled so you don't know what you will be learning.  For example I thought I clicked on a library and ended up with a video about kids in a park talking about distance and trees.  That video and whole section of learning Spanish was way over my mind and too hard for my kids.  Having them labeled would have been nice.

Pros: cute, fun, great resource for teachers, parents, home school students

Cons: no labels, nothing in English, not a child friendly website design

Contest:  Would you like to try this program for free?  This company is offering a limited time for a free membership on Speekee!  Please comment on this blog post if you want a chance.  Please comment with the gender and age of the child/ren you want the membership for.  First to comment wins! Contest ends 8/6/14

My Rating: Thumbs up and Thumbs Down.  I love the idea, my kids love playing, I just wish it was a little more child friendly with the games etc.

Bilingual Children's book review

Details:  This book is in a series to help teach children either Spanish or English.  Specifically this is the third book.  With fun bright cartoon characters, easy simple words and easy simple phrases children will want to read these to help them learn a second language.  The website works along side the books with songs, word searches, audio books, games, puzzles and more.  Easy way to help your children become Bilingual between Spanish and English.  You can buy these for your kindle and tablets through amazon.

Disclaimer:  I received one or more of the products mentioned above for free using Tomoson.com. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers.

My Review:  The Book review: This is really cool.  This is the second book we've been able to test, try and review from this company.  My kids liked that it was actually a story this time, instead of just pictures with words that are more like flash cards in their minds.  They know the story of Cinderella, so that also helped a lot.  But because my kids are boys, they don't love it.  Again, a great book to use for anyone wanting to be bilingual, to learn English or to learn Spanish.  Teachers, parents, grandparents, and also home school parent's will enjoy using this book, and the whole series.  The last book in this series that I reviewed, the author commented that my review was short.  But when you are reviewing a short paged book there isn't a lot of content to review on.  In summary: this is a great book, and series in general.  I find that its helpful, captivating to read together as a family, or in groups of kids.  We look forwards to seeing more books we can use in our school.

The Website review: We love online resources, and helps, so having another one to add to our bookmarks is great!  My 6 year old loves the website.  He is so excited to learn Spanish in school.  The website is really user friendly, in fact it is even broken up into age groups: kindergarten, first grade all the way up to fifth grade.  As the teacher of a preschooler and a 1st grader I really love using the website games and tools along with the kindle (ebook) book.  Having different tools to help teach brings the love of teaching to the children better.  Its always more enjoyable to teach and learn if there are fun ways to do it.

Pros: fun, easy to use, simple to teach

Cons: none

My Rating: thumbs up for super cute, and fun!