Spanish Calendar

I first heard about Flip Flop Spanish several years ago, when a friend mentioned using the Activity Calendar with her children.  I hadn’t really seen it, though, until I was given the opportunity to review some Flip Flop Spanish materials.

The Activity Calendar is a creative tool for learning a  pretty good bit of Spanish.  The dates are un-numbered, so you can use it in whichever year you like, and there isn’t a specified order to the content, so you can begin in whichever month you prefer.

It says that you learn “one word a day,” but it would be more accurate to say you learn “one word or phrase per day.”  Each weekday offers a new word or phrase to learn.  The phrases for a week go together to form a complete sentence.  This combination makes it non-threatening to learn, and easy to practice.

The picture for the calendar month is a black-and-white drawing — essentially a coloring page — that corresponds to the sentences for that month, providing additional reinforcement.  (Students can label the parts of the picture, too.)  Occasional suggestions for additional learning activities are sprinkled throughout  For instance, the fifth Monday in May says, “Name the things you see in Spanish as you drive in the car today.”

The first few pages of the calendar (before you get to January) provide some additional help.  There are instructions for use (which are very simple and straightforward).  There are also lists of the Spanish words for the days of the week, the months of the year, the numbers you’ll need for a calendar month, and nine colors, as well as a pronunciation guide for vowels.  The end of the calendar contains a glossary of all the words/phrases learned throughout the year.

Flash Cards

The calendar isn’t the only tool Flip Flop Learning offers, though.  There are also workbooks, readers — even an iPhone app and  a notepad with Spanish vocabulary to learn.  And flashcards.  I love these flash cards.

The problem with most language learning is that you have to hear the foreign word, translate it into your native language, and then produce the meaning.  (Or see the item, produce the native word, and translate it into the foreign language.)  Fluency only comes when you can skip right over the translation step and, for instance, see the object and produce the foreign word.

Most language learning tools aren’t really designed to build this fluency.  These flash cards are.  Rather than having English words on one side and Spanish on the other, they have pictures on the front.  The Spanish words are on the back, together with the English translation and the pronunciation guide.

Not only is this great for building fluency, it also points to one other major advantage of the Flip Flop Spanish materials: they are designed for young children.  Students don’t even have to be able to read!  Because language is acquired more easily by young children, this is the time it makes most sense to teach foreign languages but, again, most materials are not designed to enable this.  These are.

We’re really going to have a lot of fun with these. 🙂

Disclosure: The publisher provided me with a selection of materials to facilitate this review.  As always, all opinions expressed here are entirely my own.