Mar. 4, 2008 - ¿Dónde está? Parte dos...backing up a bit.
Sometimes I get ahead of myself. I have grand plans for some lesson to teach my kids, and it flops. I realize that a solid foundation needs to be in place before they are ready to take a more complicated step. Most homeschoolers find that this is true when you are trying to get your child to respond in Spanish. They need to take it in, assimilate it, and let their brain chew on it awhile before it really clicks and they are ready to respond to you.
Case in point: my own three children. My middle child is always the first to understand the concept. Never mind that she is not the oldest, I just think she is the one who will truly have more of a knack for picking up the language. The eldest tries to answer a ¿dónde está? question by putting dónde in the answer. The youngest repeats whatever I say. He doesn't understand that he needs to respond. Maybe at his age repeating is a good place to start, and to gear my efforts for him. Maybe all this makes me sound like a homeschooler who just crawled out from under a rock, but I am learning from my kids, and tweaking my approach to them every day.
That having been said, here is what we ended up doing... I introduce the phrase ¿dónde está......?, and explained that if there is more than one of something, we say ¿dónde están...? I will then ask the ¿dónde está....? questions, and the kids responded by pointing to the object! It looked like this:
Case in point: my own three children. My middle child is always the first to understand the concept. Never mind that she is not the oldest, I just think she is the one who will truly have more of a knack for picking up the language. The eldest tries to answer a ¿dónde está? question by putting dónde in the answer. The youngest repeats whatever I say. He doesn't understand that he needs to respond. Maybe at his age repeating is a good place to start, and to gear my efforts for him. Maybe all this makes me sound like a homeschooler who just crawled out from under a rock, but I am learning from my kids, and tweaking my approach to them every day.
That having been said, here is what we ended up doing... I introduce the phrase ¿dónde está......?, and explained that if there is more than one of something, we say ¿dónde están...? I will then ask the ¿dónde está....? questions, and the kids responded by pointing to the object! It looked like this:
- ¿Dónde está la lámpera? - child points to lamp
- ¿Dónde está la mesa? - child points to table
- ¿Dónde están las uvas? - child points to bananas...oops, no sweetie, those are the platanos, the uvas are here....
- ¿Dónde está el conejo? - Child points to the rabbit and then gets distracted playing with him and Spanish time is OVER!
