"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. Start whatever month you want. We cultivate love for languages and an eagerness for smart adventures and friendships around the world.
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.
Our assessment tool motivates student progress 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.
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.
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.
Apple users play our videos in Quicktime with the free Flip4Mac plug-in.
Prices. Home subscriptions are now available for an introductory fee of $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. Only homes get 24/7 access and with software included. Subscriptions may not be shared.
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.
Fluency Builders 1 and 2 run in WINDOWS. This unusual software uses a variety of interaction that cultivates 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. 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. We cover typical content and more in a time frame that varies with each school or home. Standards and content must be spread out over a realistic time frame, not a theoretical one, especially because people need time to work the material. We also add many linguistic and cultural aspects, such as word origins and connections, 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. Maximize variety by alternating between the Fluency Builder and the videos.
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.
