Upon returning from a missions trip in Latin America recently, my husband made a simple request. He wanted me to teach the children Spanish. He only knew a few words, and he found them to be useful. He wanted our children to know many more words as they interact with people during various missions opportunities and the Spanish speaking people in our community. While finding resources for my older children was easy, finding a resource that was fun and helpful for my two younger children proved to be a little harder. So, I jumped at the opportunity to be able to review Song School Spanish.

The Song School Spanish Program is meant for children who are in first through third grades, and contains a full year’s worth of Spanish learning. I used this program initially with my first grader, and decided after a couple of weeks to buy additional workbooks through Classical Academic Press’s website to use with my kindergarten and fourth grade students as well.

The complete program includes several pieces for instruction. The first component is the student workbook. This workbook includes the CD track with the songs for the vocabulary in each lesson, lyrics, learning games and activities and some standard workbook activities to fill in. There is a teacher’s book that contains answers and helpful hints for teaching. It also contains some great enrichment worksheets with crossword puzzles, word searches and extra practice for each chapter. There is a DVD that contains lessons for each chapter along with some bilingual stories.  You can use this to do the introductory teaching for each chapter. There is also a Spanish Amigo Match flashcard game, and this can be used for drilling with flashcards and also for playing memory match. In addition to the physical resources that you receive, there are additional songs, vocabulary coloring sheets and even an online game to play as a fun extra practice.

This is a really fun program for younger elementary age students. The students sing songs, color, make puppets and fill in worksheets. There is a bunch of game-based learning here, and my children were especially enamored with playing with their Tortuga and Conejo puppets, even when they were not practicing their Spanish. I loved that they used the animals as stories that we filled in words to throughout the book, and I love all the suggestions for learning.

I felt like this was a little too fast paced for my first grader, so we slowed down and added in the coloring sheets online and the extra activities in the teacher book. We broke the three-day schedule into doing smaller amounts of Spanish in about five to six days per chapter. Most chapters took us two weeks, but we have had a great deal of fun with it, and most importantly, my children are learning Spanish words and grammar as they go.

-Product review by Rebecca Ray for The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, December, 2016