Teaching a foreign language can be a seemingly overwhelming task for someone like myself who does not speak any other language besides English. When thinking about what language to teach my children I always thought Spanish and American Sign Language would be the two most useful languages. For this review I was able to try out a Spanish program for ages 2 through early elementary ages (approximately age 10). We have all been told the younger you start the easier it is to learn! Thus Speekee Spanish, which is geared toward young learners makes for a good place to begin.

Speekee is a total immersion Spanish program for young learners which uses a series of 10 video episodes as it’s base. Each of the 10 video episodes takes place in a variety of places – a park, the zoo, a home, a restaurant, the beach, the market, etc. Throughout the series children are introduced to the Spanish language through songs, puppets, and skits with native Spanish-speaking children. Along with each video episode there are downloadable worksheets that you print out for the children to do which reinforce the terms learned during that episode.

My 2 younger children (ages 5 & 9) really enjoyed the fun videos and catchy songs. My 12 year old was a little old for the puppets and sing song nature of the videos but after watching the videos multiple times you could still catch even her singing the songs to herself! I think this is a great introduction to Spanish and like how the video episodes are organized by setting, with words and phrases that you would use in that setting, as well as including many common phrases of greeting and conversation repeated throughout.

The part I was not so thrilled about was more on the adult end. Now bear in mind this is the type A in me talking, but I feel the navigation of the program on the website is choppy and hard to navigate.

While I was preparing to write this review, I found another review that someone did including a link to the more schooled geared, teacher resources, which I found to be super helpful. My problem was it took me a good 5-10 minutes clicking on every link I could find from the Speekee homepage to find the spot where this “Scheme Section” was located, and this was after I knew what I was searching for! (It was buried in the blog.) After you get there you also realize that the link to “listen” to each of the words in the 10 units is only accessible with a different login than what you have for the online version. 🙁

The way the words are phonetically spelled out in this portion would have been VERY useful to me, the non-Spanish speaking parent, as we were stumbling through trying to make sure each word was being pronounced correctly. So useful in fact, that I want to print each of the 10 units lists of words out so that we can reference them, but there is no downloadable file to print these so printing will be a pain.

That being said, all the pieces are there for this to be a fantastically well rounded beginning Spanish program. I just feel that some of the resources need to be both easier to find, print, and be accessible to all who are using the program. But the videos are wonderful, and each of the corresponding worksheets and activities are fun, helpful ways to reinforce and use the new words and phrases the children are learning! I think anyone with young children whom they want to expose to learning the Spanish language would both find this program beneficial and fun!