Let's Play in Spanish with Susy Dorn

I am very excited to introduce everyone to a lady who is a San Jose-area celebrity among parents looking to teach their children Spanish. Susy Dorn is the educator, musician, and puppeteer responsible for Let's Play in Spanish. And play, she does.

For those of you in the Bay Area, I highly recommend that you attend a free trial class to see not only how engaging her program is for children, but also how effective.

For those of you not in the Bay Area, you're in luck - she offers her program through DVDs, CDs, and books that can be can be purchased online in her store.

Sal y Pimienta is one of the six current titles and in her usual style, she teaches Spanish vocabulary and concepts with music and humor. The DVD is broken into small vignettes and uses a mixture of live characters (shhh, don't tell your kids that it's often just Susy in different costumes), puppets, and graphics.

Kids are drawn in to learning because she is unabashed in her (and the puppets') silliness. The use of different instruments and layered rhythms adds texture to the music and they want to sing and move along because the lyrics are fun.

Like most educational programs, there is a lot of repetition to ensure comprehension. What I really appreciate is that the pace of each song is just fast enough to be keep a child's interest but also slow enough to understand clearly each word she's singing. In addition, for parents who aren't fluent, there are subtitles that you can follow to sing along with your kids.

Some of the vocabulary and concepts covered in this DVD are emotions, words that rhyme, sea life, good habits and manners, and sounds that animals make. I plan on doing some craft projects with my son and focus on a handful of songs to create mini-books with cut outs from magazines or stickers that represent each word so he can look at them while we're singing to the accompanying CD in the car.

So go ahead, what are we waiting for? Let's play in Spanish!