In addition to the lessons I’ll be posting here, I’m excited to tell you about two excellent and free online options for learning Spanish:
Ludlow-Taylor on Duolingo
On Friday before Spring Break, I sent home information for each student grades 2-5 about Duolingo.
Duolingo is a great free language learning platform for use on a computer, tablet or phone. It’s what I recommend most frequently for students or their parents to develop their Spanish at home, because it’s free and easy to access. It’s focused mostly on translation (English to Spanish and Spanish to English), but also includes listening activities. On the computer version of the site, you can access “notes” for each lesson, which explain some of the grammar details.
Duolingo also offers the option for students to join a classroom, which creates a more child-friendly version of the site (no access to chat, forums, and some vocabulary) and lets me set assignments and monitor their progress.
Signing up is easy! Just go to https://www.duolingo.com/o/xhczdq and follow the prompts.
If I can’t figure out your child’s identity from the email address or username they use -- (the classroom setting is pretty private, as mentioned, so it’s probably fine to include either a first or last name together with the other initial, but it’s up to you and whatever you feel comfortable with) -- then please send me a message letting me know your student’s name and username, so I know who is who.
So far, 15 students have registered to be part of our Ludlow-Taylor Duolingo classroom, and some are really excelling -- ¡Enhorabuena to Jack from Ms. Golub’s class and Kaeli from Ms. Henderson's class, who are so far the top-performing students in our Duolingo class!
-- Note: Duolingo famously generates some pretty wacky sentences from time to time, like “the fly is important” or “I am friends with the fastest bear.” This is part of the fun and the learning strategy! If you see something especially funny, take a screenshot and send it my way. I’ll post the best ones here as a fun way for us to share a laugh.
Rosetta Stone – for free!
I often compare Duolingo to Rosetta Stone, another famous computer-based language learning platform.
Rosetta Stone incorporates beautiful real-world images, speech recognition technology, and a greater variety of activities than Duolingo. In contrast to Duolingo’s translation-based approach, Rosetta Stone aims to be more immersive, using pictures rather than English to explain things and build comprehension. For these reasons, I find it somewhat more child-friendly.
However, Rosetta Stone is usually quite expensive.
But right now, in light of the current health crisis, Rosetta Stone is offering its platform to students for 3 months for free!
If you’d like to use Rosetta Stone, go to:
Select Spanish (Latin American) – this is the default option – then put in the required account information. For your ‘learning plan’, I recommend selecting “Beginner” and then “Basics and Beyond.”
Unfortunately, unlike with Duolingo, there’s not an easy way for me to monitor progress on Rosetta Stone. If your family is using Rosetta Stone, I’d love it if you’d send me an email with the name of any participating student(s), letting me know. Feel free to also have your students send me questions, screenshots or even just the happy news of them gaining various ‘achievements’ on the platform!
-- Note: Users report mixed results with the speech recognition software, so if it’s driving your child up the wall by marking things wrong, or driving you up the wall because there’s not a quiet place for your child to work on it, keep in mind that it is possible to disable the speaking component.