"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
"Once they see your video samples, they will be crazy not to subscribe!" - Donna W., Alabama homeschool mom and Spanish teacher
"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. We cultivate love for languages and an eagerness for smart adventures and friendships around the world. Your school can start with the first batch of 100+ videos for $600, or $500 when you order by May 31. The Fluency Builder is priced separately (about $18 per computer per year).
Download the lessons and handouts to your school server. Don't be overwhelmed by the quantity. This is a continuum of hundreds of lessons, one of several projects our team is involved in.
We add a batch of 100+ ten-minute video lessons each year. Written activities increase with each batch, but we emphasize nonwritten performance. The lessons can be viewed by groups or individuals. Start any month you please. 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.
Feature from Batch 2: All Pumpkins Are Girls (Subscription version is in much higher resolution.)
Our assessment tool motivates student progress toward a climate of using the language together.
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 some language lessons in Batch 2 specifically for upper elementary. These treat standards more extensively. It's best to start upper elementary with the first two batches, even though you probably won't finish both batches in one year.
Our videos add strong international flavor to your curriculum 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.
Apple users play our videos in Quicktime with the free Flip4Mac plug-in.
Pricing and ordering for public and private schools are on our More Info page. We charge per building, not per capita. At this time, the fee for the first batch of lessons for new video subscribers is $600 per building, and 17% off for orders placed by May 31. The Fluency Builder software is priced separately and is an important part of this enrichment program.
A subscription loans a school an additional batch of 100+ lessons each year for the same flat setup/tech fee. For instance, 08-09 subscribers who renewed for 09-10 got 200+ lessons with no additional fee for the second batch. If you start in 2010-2011 and you want 200+, you pay double but only for your starting year. For new subscribers, such a scenario might look like this for orders placed by May 31/after May 31, 2010:
Thirty of each batch are Cultural Insights for upper elementary, 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. Use however many lessons you want, and pick up from there the next year.
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.
The video lessons are more contextualized. 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 repeated at least once. View one or more in a block of time.
Our instruction is intellectually and physically interactive, and schools use it in different ways. An extended day is not necessary. Students can work the lessons completely independently if you prefer. 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 and district. Schedules and budgets allow very little time for language learning. Standards and content must be spread out over a realistic time frame, not a theoretical one. We add 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. 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.
