Costco Connection - August 2009

girl = niña

back to school

sun = sol

cat =gato

EAT BETTER FOR LESS

Easy Spanish for kids

EVER THOUGHT ABOUT giving your kids a jump-start on learning a foreign language? Kids Love Spanish, a seven-part DVD series available at selected Costco warehouses and on Costco.com, is designed to teach children ages 1 to 8 the basics of Spanish.

The series, which was recently honored with an iParenting Media Award, was developed by two sisters, Krisse Brock Kelly and Julie Brock Campbell. The Costco members grew up in El Centro, California, in the Imperial Valley, not far from Mexicali, Mexico. Both Kelly and Campbell studied in Guadalajara, Mexico, becoming fluent in Spanish. Later, both women graduated from college and worked in bilingual capacities in the workforce before getting married and starting families of their own. They eventually developed this series because they couldn’t find learning videos that engaged their young children in learning Spanish.

When I brought a video home for my kids

to test recently, I believed I was going to see a Dora the Explorer copycat production. Not so. Instead of the animated entertainment approach of Dora, Kids Love Spanish is a series of 30-minute, live-action videos that cover the Spanish alphabet, numerals, family terms, food, colors and shapes, animals and basic phrases. The DVDs feature brief appearances of Cacto (Spanish for “cactus”), an animated character that reinforces the lessons. All in all, this series takes a fairly academic approach.

I watched one of the discs with two of my daughters, Tess, 7, and Pearl, 11. The DVDs are repetitious and include lively colors and age-appropriate music. Because they are geared to younger viewers, Pearl looked at me and rolled her eyes. Tess, however, enjoyed repeating the words. The best part is that when we reviewed them at the end, she remembered almost all of the new words, trying to pronounce each one in her own version of a Spanish accent.—Will Fifield