Swedish vs. Spanish

This is when I wish we could do voices on a blog. I can imagine the loud speaker with the echo effect going, "Tuesday, Tuesday, Tuesday! Come on down for the Royal Rumble Swedish vs. Spanish!" Not that their is any question of which one would win in this house (Swedish), more just a Tuesday thing.

Speaking of Tuesday, who gives a 4 and 5 year olds homework? Seriously, it drives me crazy. When did we start getting homework? I am guessing 2nd grade, not preschool anyway. N likes it, for the most part. Though neither of them do it exactly they way they should. Yesterday N had a hard time hearing the difference between K and G (we needed the K). I don't know if she really could not hear or if she was just tired. Z can just be stubborn (wonder where she gets that from, I am going to say M). Not much else after that.

Our Spanish was very limited yesterday. We listened to some Spanish music and danced to it (N really is a natural dancer, it is one of the skills that I was talking about the other day). Then M read some Spanish picture books. That took a whole lot longer then expected.

Next Tuesday we are skipping Swedish School. We have a open house at our new school and can not make it to both. So we will skip the homework until the week after. Why do today what you can do next week. Hmm, maybe M should be in charge of the homework.

Spanish Week

Yesterday marked the first day of Spanish week. The girls really want to learn it, so we are going to encourage it (even if it was my WORSE subject in school and still have nightmares about it). Before we show pictures of yesterdays stuff, here is something leftover from Green week. N asked where food comes from and from there we (mainly N, but I want some credit) came up with this activity. We mapped where our food came from last week. Not as much international stuff if one compares to what we had in Sweden. Kids enjoyed it and it was really interesting, even to me.

Back to Spanish. We started off reading about Picasso and looking at some of his art. Then we looked at the map below. Red indicates countries that have Spanish as a first language, blue is English and green in Swedish (hard to see, I know). Good results, though Z was a bit disappointed that no large country in Africa spoke Spanish.


We then played a game. We said the Spanish word and then sounded out the Swedish or English word. When they figured it out, they got to place the post-it notes on it. We are planning on playing this one everyday this week. So by the end of the week, the entire house will be covered in Post-it notes.



Still looking for more ideas if anyone has them.

Hola

Last weeks theme was local plants and flowers. It went pretty good. It was a little tougher towards the end. We had a field trip planned for the end of the week, but we could not go because of the gas company. Then the weekend was a bit of a flop (from the theme point of view). No field trip on Saturday because we did not have the energy to fight with the girls to get ready and Sunday it just rained all day, so the garden did not get built. So, in some ways it was really successful. In other ways it was not. I am ok with that.

This weeks theme is Spanish. The girls have been desperate to learn Spanish ever since we applied to go to a 50% Spanish school (we did not get accepted). Not that I am great with language, but we are going to try it. This is what I have for this week-

- A map with all the countries that have Spanish as their first language colored in
- Post it notes game with words in Spanish, English and Swedish on it
- Food from Spanish speaking counties all week
- Books, music and movies in Spanish

That is about it. Any suggestions? I thought about flags from the different countries that speak Spanish, but otherwise I am short of ideas. Given the fact that language has never been my strong point, my ideas are limited.