Conversation Club

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 hire a tutor which is a great idea but not really within our budget. I started to get really frustrated because I felt like there was a need out there not being met. I even brought it up in my conversation group and so many of the native Spanish speakers said they wished they could find something similar for their kids so they wouldn't lose their language skills 

After a bit of soul searching, encouragement from Hubby and many, many emails and calls to different community spaces, I finally started a Conversation Club for Tweens and Teens at our library! I was really excited because we had several families interested but the first official meeting I was staring at only my own 4 kids and a librarian. I made my kids stay for the entire hour playing games with me in Spanish. They were less than thrilled 😄. The next week, same thing. Y'all, we spent more than 2 months just dragging ourselves there to play the same games we were doing at home every week. 

Thankfully I was still in contact with the other families that were interested but we couldn't get the dates and times that worked for the library to work with the families (we met a few times at other locations but it was pretty disheartening). Finally summer arrived and everything began to line up. With school out there were more "traditional school" families that were interested and our little club has finally taken off!!! We have a pretty steady core group and a few kids come and go but there are usually 10+ kids there and a few moms/abuelas as well. 

In the coming weeks I'll post some of what we do in the club, but I wanted to share one of my favorite activities we tried at the beginning. It's Human Bingo in English or Busca a Alguien Que in Spanish. The kids walk around with bingo cards (I actually have 50 prompts and only 25 per card so that each card is unique) and ask each other questions in Spanish trying to find someone who can sign a square and eventually marking a Bingo. They were only allowed to get 2 signatures from the same kid to ensure that they didn't just talk to their siblings. It was fun seeing them interact in Spanish and learning more about each of the kids that attend (and teaching a few new words to some).

The full product is available on my Teachers Pay Teachers page if anyone is interested in downloading the unique boards.