Las Canciones

Exposing any language learner to authentic material, whether it is books, songs-canciones, or videos, is essential to language learning. I personally didn’t know any nursery rhymes in either language so I was kind of stuck!!! I started making up my own canciones in Spanish. Actually much of my dialogue to Sofía is sung during the day because she loves the movement, the sounds, the dancing and motion that go along with my canciones. The best part of my crazy made-up canciones is that my husband learned my silly verse and sings them to her also! However, my research did lead me to handful of authentic nursery rhymes en Español. I found them on YouTube and downloaded them to my computer and then burned them to a disk. They are awesome because they are canciones that my husband grew up singing and are now animated. By default I have learned the lyrics and Sofía LOVES them. When we ask her if she wants to hear her canciones, she becomes very excited and claps her hands. She boogies a bit to the music, claps and is fixated on the video clips. Click HERE to see what we use at our house.
If your language is something other than Español, I’m sure you can just do a search by song name and find them. There is a special tool that I downloaded to my computer and it allows me to download and convert the YouTube videos so that I can save them to my computer. It is actually called Youtube Downloader and it is free. Click HERE to see the free program.