Spanish language books work better! It is a common misconception. Stick my child in front of a language DVD for an hour a day and they will come out speaking the language. Or, just hand over the iPad with a nice language-learning app for your child to play with. The truth is, children do learn some from these highly-interactive and hyperactive formats, but they are not near as positive as you might think.
PROBLEM #1 – Watching TV, Playing Games, Apps DECREASES the ability to focus
This is really just common sense. If a child spends hours every day sitting still, watching characters running around, acting, and playing games, their attention span and total ability to focus will decrease. This is due to the expected and conditioned need for more stimuli for the child to maintain an entertained and pacified state.
SOLUTION – Read a Book
Books are an incredible, timeless educational treasure (whether in print or eBook form — as long as they are static…just an illustration and text). Reading a book (or having a book read to your child) helps to create a level of focus, reasoning, inquisitiveness, and cognitive understanding. Your child will be focused on seeing the words, hearing them pronounced, and how this all relates to the page and the story.
PROBLEM #2 – My Child Gets BORED Too Easily — So He Needs Something Interactive
This is obviously true. Young children do not have a natural attention span or internal desire to just sit down and read a textbook for an hour on end. But this challenge should not be confronted with more games, and stimuli, but rather a more natural approach.
SOLUTION – Be Your Child’s Teacher (and make it fun-ny)
Your child is dying to spend time with you (whether they make it seem like it or not). Books are the perfect solution to developing reading skills, learning new words, and having fun. What makes BookLingual books unique, is that each book is a fun and adventurous story. These are not workbooks or flash card style pages; but rather characters, emotions, journeys, fantasy, and reality. The books then become a source of entertainment (and disguise the fact that learning is happening!)
Spanish language books work better. Clearly, we have presented the case for why books are better. We don’t claim that our bilingual books alone will lead to total fluency, but they are a very important piece of the puzzle. In order to help your child become fluent, you need to develop a full bilingual action plan and create an immersive environment. Books, bilingual books in particular will become a very important component of your plan.
Check out our bilingual-book Spanish for Kids programs now.