Speekee TV is a Spanish-language immersion program with 10 lessons from the company Lingua4 Ltd. The program was developed in the UK using native (European) Spanish speakers and puppets. It is intended for children ages 2-10. The U.S. pricing is $7.50 per month for online access. They offer the first two weeks for free.

Tornado Boy LOVES Speekee. We’ve watched all 10 lessons and he is always excited when I tell him that it is time for Speekee. The interface is easy to use and TB likes to watch the videos in full-screen with the closed captions on. This allows him to read what is being said in both Spanish and English. The music used in Speekee is very catchy and he will often sing along with several of the songs including the intro and closing that are used in all of the episodes. Clips of Spanish children are interspersed with the three puppets – Speekee (the little alien looking guy in the graphic at the top of this review), as well as Dino and Lupi, who are two sock puppets. There is an adult, Jim who also converses with Speekee in some of the scenes. The children do sometimes interact with Speekee. There are some scenes that were clearly filmed with a green screen, but a lot of them were filmed on location at places like a school, the park and the zoo to support the content of the lessons.

Since this is immersion-style program, there is no English spoken. The entire program, singing and speaking, is entirely in Spanish. The lessons use a spiral-style approach where words that are introduced in one lesson are repeated in subsequent lessons without the same amount of context. If your child is reading the subtitles, this is not a big deal. If your child is not a reader, or you are watching without the subtitles, it would be helpful to watch the 10 lessons in sequential order. Each lesson gives children the opportunity to respond to Speekee in Spanish. You can see a clip of how that is prompted here.

The child is given “awards” at certain points in the program. You can see the graphics at the bottom of the screen shot above. Tornado Boy really wanted to click them and having something happen, but they are just to look at.

Each lesson has companion worksheets that you can download and use with your children. My only real complaint with the Speekee program lies with those companion worksheets. They’re all named “worksheet”, so when you download them, you must remember to rename them something more meaningful or you’ll end up with a bunch of pdf files with the same name. Yes, that’s the voice of experience talking!

I really wish that there were more than 10 episodes of Speekee! I do not speak any Spanish, but Tornado Boy is definitely interested in learning the language. Speekee was a fun way for us to learn together. It does make me curious about some of the grammatical rules that Spanish uses. I’ll have to do some research to continue to use the program, especially if we want to do more of the written worksheets.

Speekee is also offered in DVD format, but it may not be compatible with all U.S. players. It uses the PAL video format. You can follow Speekee on Twitter for more information and offers.

If you’d like to see what other TOS Review Crew members think of Speekee, you can visit our Crew blog.

Thanks so much for reading!

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

Disclaimer: I am a member of The Old Schoolhouse Review Crew for 2010-2011 and receive free products and services in exchange for a thorough and honest review. Though I am compensated with free products, I am not compensated in the form of cash for my reviews. My reviews will always reflect my honest opinions, findings, beliefs and experiences with the products and services that I have received.

We had a pretty light week here. I’ve been a bit under the weather and Tornado Boy had camp for a couple of days this week.

Social Studies:
Many of our activities this week had a patriotic theme. We watched the free weekly video on Brain Pop Jr about U.S. Symbols. We always love their content and this was no exception. The video explains many different symbols of our country like our flag and what the parts mean. Tornado Boy played their symbol matching game and then colored a U.S. Flag.

We have a small U.S. and state flag in our classroom. We talked about how to treat the flag as well. We made our patriotic centerpiece and also listened to a few of patriotic songs like “American the Beautiful“, “You’re a Grand Old Flag” and “Yankee Doodle“. All of the songs are on the “Songs of America” CD and the nice this is that it’s really inexpensive.

Spanish:
We’ve continued to work with the first three Little Pim DVDs this week. I’d estimate that he knows about half of the vocabulary words on them at this point. We’re typically watching this during “car school”. I need to sit down with them myself some night because he already knows more than I do.

Math:
I went ahead an paid for another month of Time4Learning. Tornado Boy loves it so much. I sit with him while he works through the content. It’s helped me identify some gaps in his learning. We need to do some work on sequencing again. We haven’t talked about that much in a long time. I’ll have to dig around for some activities that we can do.

Playtime:
Play-doh and Legos were the favored things this week. Ever since Tornado Boy figured out that he doesn’t have to keep the blocks exactly like they look on the package, his love for Legos has really grown. This week Bob The Builder and company moved into the fire station. They really seem to like their new accommodations. Scrambler and Benny now have covered parking and I caught Bob and the firedog sunbathing on the roof:

To see what other families are up to this week – hop on over to Homeschool Creations.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

Here’s what we’ve been up to for the past week or so:

Science:
How does your garden grow? Quite well! We have fresh cherry tomatoes this week and our pepper is getting bigger. Tornado Boy loves to see if any tomatoes are ripe enough to pick each morning. We definitely are very limited with space in the Aerogarden, but I love that it’s inside and we really are involved with it each day. I know that the plants would be much bigger if they were outside, but I’m afraid that we would have forgotten to water them and they would have died in this awful heat.

Vocabulary:
We’ve been very pleased with the combination of Wordly Wise and Spelling City. We’ve completed four lessons in the past couple of weeks. One more lesson and we’ll be able to try out some of the games available on the Wordly Wise site, too. I’m already seeing leaps in Tornado Boy’s vocabulary as he tries out new words. We’ve done some side lessons as we’ve explore the new words. This is a great program for when you’re done with phonics lessons.

Spanish:
We’ve discovered Little Pim! I’ll create a full post with a product review in the coming weeks once we’ve had more time with him; but so far we really like it. It teaches in a manner that’s aimed at babies to preschoolers and is similar to how we learned sign language when TB was a baby. Tornado Boy is quickly picking up new words in Spanish. It’s definitely piqued his curiosity because a few days ago in the car he switched his Bob the Builder video to Spanish mode and was singing along with the theme song in Spanish. It’s fun to watch him play with a new language. It’s going to be like sign language all over again when I was working to keep up with him!

Playtime:
The costume box was very popular this week. We also got to try out some new costumes and props at the Children’s Museum.

To see what other families are up to this week – hop on over to Homeschool Creations.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.