The Fruit of Her Hands: Spanish for Children-Speekee TV

Speekee TV is fun way for your children aged 2-10 to learn Spanish. We've been using this for about the last 6 weeks. The kids love it. Speekee is the character you see below. At first I thought Speekee was a bit creepy, but she grows on you. There are also two puppets, Dino and Lupi, the other characters are all real adults and children. Some animation is included too.

Speekee utilizes the immersion method. It is entirely in Spanish. There are captions in English and Spanish which is helpful to me since it's been over 25 years since I had Spanish in high school. The captions can be turned on and off with the click of a button.

Speekee is a 10 episode program that includes 40 weeks of lesson plans. The lessons are found on the website and can be sent to you each week by email. Below is a clip of 3 different weeks of lessons. By clicking on any of the daily lessons, it opens up to a full lesson plan page giving you full details of what you can do. You will find ideas for activities, worksheets and flashcards to print.

clip of the lessons for each week

This is a clip of the actual lessons for week 5.
Links to the print outs that go along with the lessons are found in the margins.

Emma working on a worksheet about colors.

Watch this clip of one of the songs:

All of the songs are catchy and fun. I get them stuck in my head and I often hear the kids singing them. The kids age 2, 4, 6, 9 and 10 all watch this just about every day. I've been scheduling it in for every day. The lesson plans are for a 4 day week. We've mainly just been watching the videos and I try to speak Spanish to them every day (that I'm learning from the videos--ahem--re-learning from high school Spanish). Even my 12 year old said he is learning more from Speekee than he is from the Spanish curriculum I have for him. This is probably true because it is so much fun.

I have printed out flashcards (2 per sheet, I didn't want full size flashcards) and laminated them. We haven't used them much though because most of the kids enjoying this either can't read yet or are just learning. I do wish they had an English translation page for the teacher. Without sitting down and watching the videos myself I don't know what everything on the cards mean.

A few of the printables

The children earn points from watching videos and there is a "mercado". They can make a sock puppet avatar but I didn't tell the kids about it because there is only 1 sock puppet avatar and 5 kids using this. I think you will understand why I didn't tell them. I've tried it myself and I kind of don't get it. I'm not really sure if you can do anything else with the points. There is another screen that pops up with a picture of Speekee and blocks of color you can buy, which I have done BUT I don't know what I'm "paying" for really.

Each episode is between 16 and 20 minutes long. There is a total of over 150 minutes of video. The kids enjoy watching these over and over.

I had a tiny bit of trouble finding the lessons in the beginning. At the bottom of the video screens there is a link to FastTrack that contains all of the lessons. Now that I know where to look there is no problem. It's actually set up in a very easy to use format. It's also great that they email you the plans for the week (only if you sign up).

Speekee, Dino and Lupi

I highly recommend Speekee. It's not often that the kids enjoy learning this much. You can try it free for 2 weeks and I recommend that you do! We really, really love Speekee!! I think this would be a great introduction to Spanish for any child under the age of about 12. I probably wouldn't buy this for kids in the older category if I didn't have younger children as it really is geared toward the younger ones. The older ones will enjoy it though.

Purchase Speekee TV for $7.50 a month or $60 for a full year. The first two weeks are free and you may cancel at any time. They also have DVDs that can be purchased but they are not made in the US and may not work on your player. More information about that can be found on the website.