Lengua Tweens & Teens

One of the best parts of being bicultural is getting to share the foods of both cultures with your kids. Bella , Boneripper , Lil Poundcake and I made tostones together tonight with some pinchos and mayoketchup. ¡Que rico!

As I mentioned before, my kids and I started a Spanish Conversation Club for tweens and teens at our local library. Each week we gather as a group of about 15 to talk and play in Spanish. I was a teacher for many years so working with this age group isn't anything new to me, but I'm constantly trying to come up with activities that the kids will enjoy. This can get difficult when you factor in the multiple levels of Spanish we have, the fact that even the most boisterous kid is typically shy when speaking in a minority language, and the fact that I'm still not really bilingual (I had to look up the words for trident, hot air balloon, incubate and bunk bed today in the group).  I have a set of about 30 different games that we could play depending on group size and language levels and I think most of them have gone over pretty well but activity had the kids shouting out answers which is a dream when they typically won't respond to me! Here are some of the games we play an...

Last year I started attending a Conversation Club for Spanish learners at the library and I loved it! We meet for 2 hours weekly - the first hour we converse in Spanish (with native speakers helping us) and then we switch to English for the second hour and we reciprocate. I've known about it for much longer but was too afraid to attend until my kids pushed me into being brave and just trying it. I've made some great friends, learned pointers,  new vocabulary and probably best of all, I've lost a lot of fear of speaking in Spanish.  So of course I started looking for something similar where the kids could use their Spanish. I was pretty hopeful because we live in a large, ethnically diverse city in the South with a big Hispanic population. I found lots of homeschool classes for beginners which wasn't a good fit after 5 years of Spanish exposure. I found some online classes for intermediate levels but my kids really aren't into zoom classes. Some people suggested that...

I try to make challenging ourselves in Spanish a daily part of our lives. I started a Preteen Conversation Group (which I'll tell you more about later) that has several different levels of Spanish speakers so I created this 30-day challenge to push each of the kids to reflect on and work toward their Spanish learning goals.  Click image to download