As a company, Sonrisas Spanish has had to do what companies do—we have had to grow our business. This means that we offer Spanish curriculum for grades PreK-8th. But when we started, we designed the Sonrisas Spanish curriculum for early childhood. This is because we were teaching mostly young learners in preschools and after-school programs. This is how we got our start in preschool Spanish.
In 1996 my wife Blue and I were teaching bilingual education in the Austin Independent School District. We did most of our instruction in Spanish. We provided Spanish-speaking students with foundational learning in core subjects in their primary language. As students progressed through the grades, they would transition to more instruction in English. We had been trained in many bilingual, ESL, and language learning methodologies.
That year a school in our neighborhood approached us. They wanted to know if we would be interested in teaching an after-school Spanish class for kindergartners. Blue started doing this the following school year. After a year of doing this, other schools approached us about teaching Spanish. We realized there was a market for preschool Spanish classes and after-school classes. So we quit our teaching jobs and started Sonrisas Spanish School.
We knew that we could apply many of the same language learning methodologies that we learned to develop lessons for teaching Spanish to young learners. Methods like TPR, The Natural Approach, and the Theory of Multiple Intelligences informed our approach to teaching Spanish.
We also knew from our public teaching experience that young learners thrive with structure and routine. When you establish these in the classroom, students feel comfortable and safe in their learning environment. This helps to put their brains in a receptive state for learning. We came up with a consistent lesson structure of Circle Time, Story Time, and Art Time. This routine not only provided structure, but it also enabled us to use many different modalities in each lesson.
This was a huge part of the success of our Spanish classes—having structure, but also lots of different kinds of activities. This ensured that children with different strengths had the opportunity to engage with the content of the lesson. Through music, calendar activities, role-play, stories, and art projects students had the opportunity to communicate and interact in Spanish in different ways.
We also made sure that we focused on having fun in our Spanish classes. We designed activities that we knew would be fun for young learners. When students have fun in Spanish class, they don’t even realize that they are learning the language.
As our business grew, we continued to create more and more lessons. We were teaching in many different preschools in the Austin area. This allowed us to do lots of trial and error with the content of our lessons. We continued to use the activities that worked in our classes and based new lessons off of those.
In this way, we developed a set of lessons that we knew were effective. Eventually we thought that the lessons we had could be a good resource for other teachers doing preschool Spanish. We took a couple of years to compile the best lessons, worked with a friend who was a graphic designer, and first published “Sonrisas Spanish School: An Early Childhood Spanish Curriculum” in 2002.
The point of this story is the idea that even though Sonrisas Spanish has grown, we got our start in preschool Spanish. This was our first love and joy in teaching Spanish. The Sonrisas Preschool Curriculum maintains a focus of effective instruction for young learners.
We all know that the best time for children to learn language is when they are young. It is also the most fun time to teach language. Young children are so uninhibited in their learning. They’re not afraid to take risks. They easily make connections between language and their physical bodies.
Young children get so much joy out of learning another language, and there is so much evidence of the benefits of early language learning. We really need to be doing more of it in the United States. If you’re looking for a great way to teach Spanish to your preschoolers, I encourage you to check out the Sonrisas Spanish curriculum.
