already???

Rebekah is taking Driver's Ed!  I don't know how I feel about this.  =)

The Learnables Spanish

Don't you hate learning vocabulary?
Isn't that the worst part of learning a foreign language? I know that vocabulary lists are not easy, but we have found an easy way to learn Spanish with no vocabulary lists!

We are using The Learnables Spanish curriculum, which can come in a CD-ROM for The Learnables portion of the study or with audio CDs and books.  The Learnables are the colored red and yellow books pictured below, and are the books in which there is no reading.  Only listening and looking at the pictures.
►The other books that include listening, pictures, and reading, Basic Structures and Grammar Enhancement, only come in books and audio CDs. (as of 2009)
We use the audios and book for all of it. (We didn't have a good computer when I first ordered these, but also they're more portable for us since we don't have a laptop.)

It is like a book of flashcards, but you do not look on the back to see if you are correct, because for the first three or four months, you simply listen and look at the 'cards' in the book. You keep up with the native Spanish speaker by listening to what number he is on. So it is like vocabulary, but there is no trying to see if you're right, and then getting it wrong. ("un-teaching" yourself)
After you have listened and learned numbers 1-10, you begin your first lesson.  The speaker says the number of the exercise, and the words and phrases are repeated twice.  The speaker will come back to new words rather quickly.  There are sound effects for some words and phrases so you'll know what action is being done.  By the end of Lesson 1, your first day, you are hearing and understanding short sentences in the present tense, the difference between big and small, and two objects together joined with "and". Keep listening to this lesson for one to two weeks, until you have learned it well.

I have studied with The Learnables curriculum in the past, and I am using it this year with my daughter. After three days, she said when she heard a word or phrase, the pictures were beginning to pop into her mind.

This is a big plus, because many people can speak a foreign language after studying it, but have a hard time understanding spoken words by another person. I know this is true from my own trip to Mexico after a year of learning high school Spanish from a native speaker.  I had learned more to speak than to listen.  However, my teacher's daughter (who also went on the trip) had heard some Spanish at home even though the parents primarily spoke English (her mom is American-born, and since they lived here, they spoke mostly English for the kids).  And although she had not taken a Spanish class and didn't know how to conjugate verbs, or even know how to say some words I could say, she could understand more of what her Mexican cousins and relatives were saying than I could.

The first book, The Learnables 1 (with 4 CDs), is 10 lessons, with 100 images each (some repeated, some combined with other words in other pictures for phrases or sentences), which takes about a week or two for each lesson. Just listen to it a couple of times each day (around 20 minutes each time), only moving on to the next lesson when you are sure you know all the phrases or sentences in your mind. 

The first book can take a total of 10-20 weeks, depending on your background with Spanish.

Below is a partial lesson.  To save time, parts of the lesson are skipped. 
Subsequent lessons add new words and new phrases & sentences, while using the words from previous lessons.  

You will note that in the beginning, the speaker only says the word itself, then adds la or el in front of it.  You may want to ask your child what the speaker does differently when he first introduces a word, then what does he add to it later?  

I find this works better for my kids than just simply telling them. 🙂

Apologies for the poor audio quality!  The CD player sounded loud and clear sitting beside me, but did not record well.  

The Learnables - Spanish | Book 1 - Parts of Lesson 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2BgIlGfjZo

 

This can seem rather dull at first, but as more vocabulary is introduced, the pictures evolve into stories that keep students involved and interested.  

After completing The Learnables 1 (the red book), the student goes on to Basic Structures 1 (105 pages, with 3 CDs), where they get to Read Along with the Spanish CDs and see pictures. These are sentences and short paragraphs comprised of the words already learned in The Learnables. These lessons also are meant to be paced and reviewed. (I think I remember reading in the front of the book that each lesson should be gone over at least three times.) The workbook part of the lesson can't be redone unless answers are written in a notebook, but reading the paragraphs along with the CD can.  =)

This does not seem like enough work for an entire year of homeschool Spanish, but keep in mind, it is meant to be reviewed often before going to the next step.

Total for 1st year = 2 books, 7 CDs.

The second year has an additional book, Spanish Grammar Enhancement 1, (280 pages, with 4 CDs) which is to be used first before beginning The Learnables 2, (12 lessons, with 4 CDs) and Basic Structures 2 (360 pages, with 7 CDs)
The Learnables 2 and Basic Structures 2 are like the 1st year books, but with longer and more complex sentences.

Total for 2nd year = 3 books, 15 CDs

We plan on beginning Spanish Grammar Enhancement 1 near the end of this school year instead of waiting for next fall. 
Didn't happen!  But we'll get it.


The Grammar Enhancement book has many sentences with the same verb, then introduces new ones, then mixes them so the student will learn when to use them.  It does the same for pronouns, prepositions, and singular/plurals.  For Grammar Enhancement, I plan for the kids to listen to about 20-25 pages a day (25 min or so), (and for Basic Structures, maybe fewer pages ? because they look longer) but to do these 2, or maybe 3 days in a row.  Somewhere in the front of the book, it says to do everything at least twice.
These CDs use 6 different speakers.

Pictured at the top of this post are pages from The Learnables 1.  Here's a link to sample pages in the other books.  Click to enlarge.

The computer version sample online (of the CD-ROM version of The Learnables books -- remember, I only pictured the book version here) only shows the first 10 images, which does not really show you how it really works, in my opinion. The pictures do not "come into your mind" because you do not get far enough into the lesson for this to start happening.
Update:  To the right of the current sample shown, you can click on a Level.  Level 1 shows Lesson 4, which is what students would be learning during weeks 7 and 8.  
But you can hear how it sounds, and see how the computer version would work.

See the above video/link to see how they learn, and are learning sentences beginning their first day.  

The books may be on eBay or Amazon. I recommend researching the curriculum site and calling them to make sure you know exactly what you're looking for.

►IMPORTANT -- More about our experience with The Learnables. 
►Other testimonials 

 

chicken n dumplings

Rebekah is sick w/ a sore throat, so Bethany made chicken 'n dumplings while I did math w/ JohnDavid. Isn't she sweet?  =)
 

Rebekah has glasses

Rebekah's glasses seem to be exactly what she needed! She completed several lessons in school this afternoon, facebooked, and answered email for awhile... well, not in that order, ha. Then when she went to bed, she read for awhile. =) No headaches! yeah! Thanking the Lord it was nothing serious. =D

first kill

JohnDavid was outside shooting his bb gun, and he hollered, "Mama! I shot my first animal!" Then he brought it up to the door!!! It was a cricket, lol. It had been sitting on the box they were shooting at. 
I laughed, then I told him his daddy said not to shoot anything he wasn't going to eat! 
Then HE laughed!

school!

Starting school tomorrow! More to do this year w/ Rebekah going into 9th grade. Spanish and Algebra! Woo-hoo! My 2 fav subjects. =D Can't wait!

true love?

When...the...moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's amoré...

And this pizza has NO pizza sauce!  YUM YUM!!!  Well, it has something, but it's a creamy color, not the traditional pizza sauce.  Soooo good!

on the air!

My girls sang on the radio this morning! =) Their Grandpa had taped them last week (he records and takes the church tape to the radio station each week) and they played it on the church's broadcast this morning!

7 loads of laundry!

Wooo!  Finally done w/ laundry!  SEVEN loads of laundry from kids being at camp this week.  It was teen week, and they had to dress nicer for evening service because it was also revival week there.  All my kids in teen camp.  Hmmm, not sure how I feel about my babies growing up!

Arriving at camp.
Rebekah in the flag shirt, Bethany in the lavender, and JohnDavid is #27.   The others are their cousins.

duh!

Crazy sign in Hardees this morning!

lol

egg on the floor

JohnDavid got me good! (and Bethany was in on it, too!) He told me to stand behind the door and put my thumb and finger thru the crack like the letter C. Then he put an EGG in my grasp. Now I was stuck holding it there or dropping it on the floor!!!
Then I thought he had his hand below mine, so I let go of the egg, and it broke on the carpet!
He cleaned it up, tho.
What a cool prank!  (especially since HE cleaned it up!)

my "invisible" deer

Coming down my driveway today, I saw a deer partly hidden behind a limb of a tree about halfway up the last hill. I could see his legs.
"Oh, I wish someone were with me to share this. Hey, I have my camera in my pocketbook!"

I put the camera on video mode and zoomed in.
I slowly inched the car forward, watching... finally the deer stepped out! I pressed the shutter. Two seconds later, he bounded across the driveway into the woods.
"But I got him running for a few seconds at least," I thought.

I pulled up to the house and pressed the buttons to make the video play back.
"Hmmm, I don't see the 6 second one... this one is 29 seconds... Maybe it kept recording."

I pressed play.... and I saw... my lap, the steering wheel, the speedometer...NO DEER.
I had videoed the part where I was inching down the driveway!!! And when I saw the deer step out and had pressed the shutter, I had STOPPED the video! lol.

So here is my picture of my invisible deer. He had been standing about halfway up that hill, on the right just behind some protruding tree limbs.

my "invisible" deer, lol

4th of July!

We celebrated the 4th of July at my brother-in-law's house!   =)

…grilled pork chops, potato salad, corn on the cob, lemonade, watermelon… volleyball, popcorn game, basketball, playing in the tree house… Grandpa’s birthday card, arrowheads (we presented to him - found on "our"/HIS land where we live =)… looking thru old picture albums, singing with Grandpa, playing the piano… fireworks,roasting marshmallows...lots of fun!
I can hardly get a pic of JohnDavid... he won't let me!  In pics, it seems like I only have 2 kids... =\

twins are 12

JohnDavid and Bethany turned 12 years old this month!  So big.  Almost as tall as I am now...

Here's Oscar, their new hamster.

A great time having a water fight!

return of the dementia

(For the first dementia story, read "Chili Bean Dementia".)
Still having allergy problems, JohnDavid and I stayed home from the campmeeting again.
A few minutes after Travis and the girls left, the phone rang. It was my niece Abigail. She wanted to see if we'd left yet, but she hadn't been able to get us on the cell phone. Oh, no! I bet Travis forgot the phone. We only have one cell phone. I checked, and yep, it was still in my pocketbook in the bedroom.
"They should be at the campmeeting in about 10 minutes or so," I told Abigail. "Are you going?"
She said yes, she was. So I told her she should see them in a few minutes.
After I hung up, I saw on my cell that I had 2 missed calls. I checked my messages, and one was from Travis. I hadn't paid attention to what time it said the call came in before I hit delete, so I thought, "Maybe he called me on the way to church. I'll call him and see if he did."
I walked back in the living room, dialing on the home phone. A few seconds later, the cell phone in my other hand started ringing. "I bet that's him calling me back," I thought.
I looked at the cell phone.
It said, "Home is calling."
I just sat down in the living room chair, and laughed. All by myself in the living room, laughing and laughing!
(I am really, really crazy)
Oh, can I blame it on allergies? Hmmm... I thot not.

on chat too much

Ha ha, about six months ago, Rebekah was reading a book, and she said, "I'm mixed up; I don't know who is talking." There were two people in the book talking back and forth for a long conversation, and she'd lost track of which person was talking.
Well, instead of telling her to look back at the top of the page, I unintentionally told her to scroll back up! LOL, I've been chatting online way too much.