Teach Your Child Spanish - BookLingual Review & Giveaway

When I saw the opportunity to review a bilingual Spanish/English book program, I was elated.  As many of you know, I'm a K-8 Spanish teacher and I'm always on the lookout for great new teaching resources for my classroom.  The BookLingual is a program developed to help parents teach their children Spanish through engaging books, but I found it to be useful for my classroom as well.  I haven't had a chance to incorporate the books into my lessons yet, but I they are an integral part of my lesson plans next month.

I received a sample of six books from the full 32 book program.  The books come in digital form, which initially made me a bit wary (despite being a blogger, I'm not on the up and up with all technology).  I soon discovered that digital format is a boon; as a teacher, I'm able to project the book for the entire classroom to read along with me and am able to ask certain students to read particular pages.  Any parents with a tablet, ereader, or even a laptop computer can make it a more personalized experience as well.  

As a Spanish teacher, I really like these as a teaching tool.  (If I didn't, I wouldn't plan to use them with my students!) Here's why:

• The pictures are engaging and the stories are fun for kids.  It's clear that the intent is to entertain as well as teach.  You'd be surprised how many foreign language materials are bland, lack story lines, and are clearly only there to teach specific words.  It's common sense that kids learn better when they are actually interested in the content.
• Some of the words with more difficult pronunciations have a "pronunciation guide" right there.  This is certainly helpful for parents that are learning Spanish along with their children. (See imageto the left.)
• Certain corresponding words are similarly colored in Spanish and English so children can make the connections between the two.  In the past, I have often shied away from bilingual books because many of them confuse students more than teach them.  Most beginning Spanish students assume that word order is the same in both languages and make connections between the first word in each sentence, second word in each sentence, etc.  By having two words with the same meaning highlighted in the same color, student can make the proper word correlations. (See image below.)
• The books have patterns that help children learn grammar without it being explicitly taught.  For example, I look forward to teaching noun-adjective agreement and word order to my younger elementary students with Come to the Zoo.  (See image below.)
• The books have various ability levels, so your child has the ability to improve throughout the program.

from Come to the Zoo

This is a great starting place for learning Spanish, especially for learning to read Spanish, which is often forgotten in other children's Spanish programs.  I am really looking forward to using these in my classroom and reading them to my own sweet pea at home.  I am actually planning to ask my principal about buying the full program for my classes.  If you have any questions about teaching your little one Spanish or whether this program might work for you, I'd love to chat.   Leave a comment below or send me an email.

Ready to get the BookLingual program for yourself?  BookLingual is offering an amazing deal:

Click on the image above to get this great deal, or click on the pre-order page here.
5% of the proceeds always goes to charities, such as St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

You can find out more about BookLingual by liking their Facebook page.

BookLingual is also giving away the six book set I was able to sample (emailed to the winner).  To enter, use the PromoSimple widget below.  Contest will end 3/27.  Good luck!

BookLingual Six Book Set    

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.