I had never heard of Classical Academic Press until I was allowed to review their Song School Spanish course. CAP(Classical Academic Press) has a variety of courses that they sell to help your children excel in their home school program. If you've been following my blog for long you will know that we love to use a variety of homeschool curriculum around here. We had not tried a foreign language yet with our kiddos so my oldest was excited to try this one out!
With this I received the Song School Spanish student book(with CD) as well as the teachers edition. The CD that comes with the student book(it is inside the back cover) includes 44 songs to help your children learn. All of my kiddos enjoyed the CD even though they were not using the curriculum.
The student book is geared towards the K-3rd grade and costs $24.95. I've heard it said that children learn languages better the younger they are when exposed to them. My kids have occasionally watched Dora and Diego to pick up a few Spanish words. My daughter(who is in first grade) was very pleased that she already knew a few of the words in the curriculum.
The teachers edition includes all of the student book plus the keys to go with the worksheets. This book costs $24.95 as well. It also includes ideas of how to use the curriculum in your classroom. I also want to share that it also has over 40 pages of extra work pages that you can use with your child who has excelled and finished all of their normal coursework and wants to learn more. The answer keys for these are included as well.
I do want to point out that they offer a Song School Spanish bundle that included the student and teachers books as well as the Spanish Amigo Match Flashcard Game. This offer is only $66.95.
Now that I've told you all about the course, let me tell you a bit about how we used this. We loved the vocabulary words the most and it was also something that the other kids could look at and participate in. We decided the best thing to do was to make flashcards with the vocabulary words. Each chapter had it's own list so you can separate them by chapters or by sections. There are review chapters within the lessons and so when we would hit those we'd combine the chapters that went with that review. By the time we finish the course we will have all of the words together in one big stack!
As I mentioned before, my kids LOVED the songs. I have some kids who just learn everything better if you can put it to music or rhyme. For them they didn't need the book, they just needed those songs and they were good. We loved to take the cd with us in the van and just listen to us. If we hadn't covered that material yet they'd just listen to the song, but I found they were also picking up the words as they'd be using them later in the day. It makes me wish we could get a cd like this for our vocab words in English too!
For me, the teachers edition was great! I loved that it didn't just give me numbers and answers. It shows what they're actually doing in their workbook and just adds the answers in. It even shows the pages that the kids aren't having questions on. Each page of the teachers book holds two pages of the student book. This makes it so the teachers book isn't that much thicker than the student book and is very easy to use without having to constantly be flipping back and forth between pages. Easily one of the easiest to use teachers guides I've come across.
If you'd like to find out from other members of the Crew what they thought of the Song School Spanish program of two of the other CAP programs feel free to visit the Crew Blog and pick which ones to read. There are several and they're all great!
Disclaimer: I was provided with a copy of this curriculum for free in association with the TOS Schoolhouse Review Crew. I was not compensated in any other way besides this curriculum. All thoughts and opinions in this review are my own and not influenced in anyway. I was not coerced to write a positive review but rather wrote my own thoughts(or those of my children) on the curriculum. I am disclosing this to be in compliance with the FTC Regulations.
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Yes...kids learn so much faster than adults. I can see being fluent in Spanish as being a job requirement in the future.
ReplyDeleteThis is such a fantastic idea and concept. Thank you for the review.
ReplyDeleteSounds like a great program. I wish I had it when my kids were younger!
ReplyDeleteI have been wanting to teach, learn, Spanish with the kids. I will look into this one!
ReplyDeleteI need to look at this as well, i want my kids to be well versed!
ReplyDeleteMy 3 year old loves to sing so I'm sure she would do awesome with this. I don't think I am going to homeschool her but if I do, I will definitely have to remember this book.
ReplyDeleteMy daughter loves to sing so this would be perfect for her!
ReplyDeleteThis would be awesome to try! I bet it's great for any age.
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