His Treasure Seekers

Foreign Language can be a hard subject for home educators to teach if they don’t know the language themselves.  I really want my children to develop a proficiency in Spanish that exceeds my own limited abilities, so I have been incredibly thankful for the online courses available from Middlebury Interactive Languages.  Both of my older boys have benefited from their Spanish 1 course for Grades K-2 (see reviews of Semester 1 and Semester 2), and recently Elijah got a chance to start working through Elementary Spanish 2 (Grades 3-5).

About Elementary Spanish 2 (Grade 3-5)

Like all the Middlebury Interactive Languages Courses, Elementary Spanish 2 uses stories, songs, videos, and interactive games to help students learn basic vocabulary.  Depending on the activity, they must listen, read, write, and speak the key words for each lesson.

Elementary Spanish 2 (Grades 3-5) covers 16 units over two semesters, each unit consisting of six lessons.

Within each lesson, there is a variety of activities.

Students can go back and repeat lessons as many times as they want.

Our Experience

This course was definitely more advanced than the Grades K-2 course, mostly because of the addition of the reading and writing activities.  Elijah reads at at least a strong 3rd grade level, but I think this made the course more challenging than he expected.  While I do think it is important to be able to read and write when learning a new language, I am cautious about adding in too much of this.  In my own foreign language experiences, focusing on the written aspect of the language has hindered my ability to speak and understand it when spoken.  This is mostly due to the fact that I am a VERY visual learner and NOT strong at auditory learning.  I think there was still enough variety in this course to make it worthwhile for students like myself, who really need to focus on listening and speaking to become proficient, but because of this aspect, I didn’t like the Grade 3-5 course as much as I did the one for Grades K-2.

The only other issue we had was that because this course was building upon what Elijah has learned in the Spanish 1 course, it was beyond my own knowledge of the language.  He struggled a little more in this course, but now I’m not able to help him nearly as much.  Most of the time just going back and repeating some of the introductory lessons in the unit was enough to answer his questions and get him back on track, but I could see where it might be helpful to have the teacher support, which is available for an additional cost.

Overall, I still think Middlebury is a great option for families whose students need to work independently on learning a foreign language.  I love the way the stories immerse the student in the language by using only Spanish, highlighting the vocabulary words to help them understand while getting them accustomed to hearing the language spoken fluently.  My children may never speak Spanish completely fluently themselves, but Middlebury has at least given them a good foundation upon which to build.