Hello. My name is Emma. I come from Santander, in the North of Spain, but I have lived in the UK since 2002.
I run a company called Babelitos, which delivers Spanish lessons at all levels for people of all ages. You can find information about what I do in my website http://www.babelitos.com
My current youngest “student” is my 9 month old baby daughter who is already starting to say “mama” and understands some simple words, such as “adios”, “besitos”, etc.
There is something very special about working with young children. They are full of life and I really enjoy seeing them learning and making incredible progress from day to day.
I am very lucky because in my after School clubs we do not have to follow any determined specification which means that I can be very flexible and can choose the themes or topics that I want to teach them.
We always have plenty of opportunities to do activities which are fun and very enjoyable, not only for them, but also for me.
A Couple of weeks ago we learnt the topic of animals. We learnt the basic vocabulary related to animals, which some of you might be familiar with as well. So, yes, we learnt that dog is perro, cat is gato, cow is vaca and so on.
But we also learnt the vocabulary related to less common animals, such as murcielago, which is bat or pulpo which is octopus. All children loved the activity which we did as part of the lesson.
I played a video of hybrid animals which I had found in Youtube. Of course, the music is so good that it immediately grabbed everybody’s attention and helped them understand the concept of hybrid.
You can find the video here:
Immediately after watching the video I asked all the children to create their own “Animaleshibridos”.
Wow!!
Children’s imagination has no limit whatsoever.
They came with the most amazing drawings of animals which were a mixture of monkey and squid or giraffe and spider, just to mention a few.
Of course, they were also asked to label their animals by using the Spanish words for both animals and mixing them in the way they liked.
So for example if monkey is “mono” and “squid” is calamar. The hybrid animal monkey+squid could be anything such as monomar or calamono.
Similarly, if they had drawn a giraffe, which is “jirafa” and a “spider”, which is araña, they could call their animal something like jiraña or arafa.
It really did not matter. It was all about learning lots and lots of new vocabulary and having fun at the same time.
I invite all of you to try the activity and maybe show us the pictures that your students draw.
Share your picture with us on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/babelitos
also visit our site at: http://www.babelitos.com/ and please tell your friends about us!
Have fun!