Homeschool Spanish Lessons - Online Learning

As my life has changed drastically in the last few years, away from merely “all things Spanish” to life with my husband and 2 kids in Alaska – I decided that it’s time for a new focus for my Spanish teaching activities as well as a completely new blog. I don’t know that I’ve ever really had a true blog – I’ve posted teaching lessons, thoughts, and updates regarding my web activities – but this blog will really be more of a traditional blog. That means a lot of it probably won’t be all that useful to everybody! But nonetheless, I feel it’s time to create a small virtual space for myself where I can talk about whatever I like.

So my plan for this blog is to talk about, well, my life!

For anybody who hasn’t followed my Spanish teaching newsletters over the years or podcast, I’m the author of Musical Spanish and a few other Spanish teaching programs, which I’ve redesigned into a web teaching program. I began Musical Spanish over 10 years ago; right out of grad school. At the time, how to get cheaply from Miami to Buenos Aires was the kind of thing that dominated my thoughts. A decade later, I’m more likely to be thinking about how to get the most amount of good nutrition into Taco Soup for toddlers!

I was wondering which one of my websites should be the home for this “real blog” talking about issues I deal with every day, as well as my efforts and ideas about teaching Spanish through technology – and I decided that HomeschoolSpanishOnline.com would be the best place, because so much of my energy and ideas right now are focused on children and family.

This blog will explore my efforts to build a true e-learning portal, and for any of you geeks who may be reading I’ll be talking about and posting some source files for my flash projects, as well as discussing Joomla, the CMS that runs this site. I almost switched to Wordpress after some guy named Dark Mare from Turkey hacked my site… but it was my own fault, as I just didn’t have the web hatches battened down enough.

Today I figured out how to get a feed from the my Mexican cookbook on Recipezaar.com into an RSS feed, so that will be featured on the blog, as well as my own individual recipes. Recipezaar is downright awesome – you can search from over 350,000 recipes and create cookbooks from them, as well as shopping lists and meal planners.

Why home school Spanish? (Aren’t your kids under 2? :) Home schoolers have always been a big part of my market, and I’ve decided to develop an e-learning solution that is targeted just for these families. I think part of that has to do with the fact that I enjoy working with kids, and creating stuff that people really USE. Many adults have bookshelves full of books and software to learn a foreign language, but have a hard time finishing any of the material. Kids are already in the learning mode, and need creative and fun ways to help them do what they are already going to have to do. So there’s a bit more satisfaction in knowing that my material might get a little more use – and obviously that’s not bad for business either!

To wrap up for today – I thank you for visiting this new blog, and hope it proves to be an interesting read – I’ll try to post as often as possible, but keep in mind this is a personal blog, so you never know what crazy albeit family-friendly thoughts will be here!