"Once they see your video samples, they will be crazy not to subscribe!" - Donna W., Alabama homeschool mom and Spanish teacher
"I just viewed a bunch of your video clips! Wonderful educational tools - you have an obvious, excellent ability to communicate using the medium. Really great." - Paul H., New York film maker
"My third and fourth graders LOVE the lion song. I keep getting requests to do the song again. It has become a reward for them and it's really neat to hear them sing along." - M.E., Wisconsin
"Your lessons are great for a teacher like me who is limited in Spanish. In fact, our principal looked into purchasing your program because of teachers like me. What a great program you have! Thank you again!" - C.M., 2nd-grade teacher, Oregon
"I wasn't sold on this until I started to use it, and now that I see how easy it is to use, I love it! If anybody has reservations about it, tell them to call me!" - Junior High teacher, Illinois
Our 10-minute videos and Fluency Builder software enrich the K-8 years with abundant exposure to language and culture, treating subjects such as kindness, aggression, food, career exploration, wildlife, weather and many other things. We cultivate love for languages and an eagerness for smart friendships and adventures around the world. Start whichever month you want.
We add a batch of 100+ ten-minute video lessons each year. Written activities increase with each batch, but we emphasize nonwritten performance.
Feature from Batch 2: La Hamaca - The hammock is a strong tradition of El Salvador.
Homes view at a resolution that allows for easy online viewing, as in this case.
Our assessment tool motivates students toward a climate of using the language together.
No bilingual or extra personnel are required. No certain number of lessons must be covered. Do what your schedule allows, and above all keep the language exposure going. We are currently preparing the third batch of 100+ videos and planning Batch 4.
The language videos have been building from lower elementary up while offering a lot to older students. But, because we made more lessons than early grades use in a year, we started making language lessons specifically for upper elementary. These treat standards more extensively. Upper elementary students who start our program this year have the Fluency Builder, 30 or 60 Cultural Insights (depending on how many batches they subscribe to), 30 language lessons designed for their level, and the many early-elementary lessons that are also appropriate. Anyone with at least a 4th-grade reading level can also use the On the Go series (ask for a coupon code).
Our videos add strong international flavor to your home because, while the main focus is on Spanish and the cultures in which Spanish is spoken, many lessons encourage the study of other languages and places. Our cultural content is new to most adults and easily exceeds what is taught in most K-12 schools.
Begin any month you please. Use as little or much as you please during your annual subscription. Don't be overwhelmed by the quantity. This is a continuum of hundreds of lessons, one of several projects our team is involved in. (Not all our products are public.)
Apple users play our videos in Quicktime with the free Flip4Mac plug-in.
Prices. Home subscriptions are $130 a year for 24/7 access online and a permanent license for the Fluency Builder 1 software ($40 retail). Homes that start with the first two batches of videos (200+ lessons) pay $260 the first year. Either way, whether you start with one or two batches, next time around you pay only $130 and you get an additional 100+ videos. That's the way this program works, and home subscriptions provide students with the advantage of 24/7 access to the videos and software. Note that subscriptions may not be shared with other homes.
Thirty of each batch are Cultural Insights for grade 4 and up, and we consider them as important as language lessons. In addition, many language lessons and most cultural lessons for lower elementary are useful to beginning older students.
Half our subscribers add our instruction to a program they're already using. The constant claim is that language study strengthens other performance areas.
Fluency Builders 1 and 2 run in WINDOWS. This unusual software uses a variety of interaction for mastering a manageable vocabulary for people to use together. The Fluency Builder serves as a dynamic set of tasks in which students make associations, choices and responses at a supervised pace that cannot be maintained when written answers are required. We have added significant updates.
The video lessons are more contextualized than our Fluency Builder software, which is for mastering a restricted range of words and sentences. The 80 to 90 annual language videos include cultural segments, handouts, frequent performance activities, and periodic paper-and-pencil tasks or quizzes. Many of the 30 annual Cultural Insights for the older students have handouts to use as quizzes, guides or springboards. Half our videos should be viewed AT LEAST twice.
Our instruction is intellectually and physically interactive. Some students do the lessons completely independently. Over time, the lessons encourage learning multiple languages by including interviews and snippets related to French, Hindi, Mandarin, German, Portuguese, Greek, signing, Latin and other languages. Cultural content is provided for every grade, and much of it relates to being world-smart in general.
Scope and Sequence and Philosophy. We cover typical content and more in a time frame that varies with each school and home. Our subscribers tend not to see language primarily as an academic area. Nevertheless, in areas of communication, grammar and culture, this enrichment allows students to eventually equal or surpass students who spend comparable time in traditional coursework. We are convinced that natural language learning requires lots of space for ungraded exposure, and that standards and content should be adjusted to your actual schedule, not just crammed in. Otherwise, mastery is imaginary. Grading can be based on participation during early stages. Text-based skills are acquired in the process. We include many linguistic and cultural aspects, such as word origins, multi-part interviews with people who open the world to the students, and unusual, interesting contexts to practice language. The general viewing order is listed in the updated syllabi found on our More Info page.
The farther you go into our sequence, there's more instruction than most schools will have time for in a given year, partly due to some intense academic components that we will be including. Maximize variety by alternating between our components and whatever else you may be using. Call us anytime at Three One Seven - Seven Three One - Twenty-Six Twenty-Nine. Feel free to call on Saturdays too.
The instruction is based on M T Russell's experience at all levels and on 1500 K-6 live distance-learning sessions he conducted, always with one foot in the Spanish-speaking world, which his family is part of.
