Learning Spanish with Latin Grammy Winner 123 Andrés (And a Giveaway!)
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Photo by Dario Treviño
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If you are learning Spanish at home with your young children, boy, do I have a wonderful resource to share with you today!
Earlier this week, I mentioned 123 Andrés in my post on our family’s favorite foreign language music (and where to find it). Today, I’d love to give you a more complete introduction to this group. I will be forever grateful to 123 Andrés for helping to transform our homeschool Spanish study from drudgery into delight and I want as many parents as possible to know abut their wonderful music and use it in their homes!
123 Andrés is the stage name of the husband-and-wife duo Andrés Salguero and Christina Sanabria. Together, they combine their respective backgrounds in musical performance and language teaching to write bilingual children’s music that is not only hugely entertaining, but also profoundly educational.
I first discovered their work about a year ago, when our local library invited Andrés and Christina to perform at a Hispanic Heritage event. At the time, my older son was really resisting speaking Spanish, and I was desperate for ways to get him to engage with the language. I put the concert on my calendar and downloaded two of Andrés’s albums to help my prepare my sons, figuring that they would enjoy the concert more if they could recognize the songs that Andrés was performing. Once we got started listening to those two albums… well, we just couldn’t stop! My sons absolutely loved Andrés’s upbeat, playful melodies and clear vocals, and I loved all of the Spanish language and cultural learning that was written (seamlessly) into each song. We listened to those albums on repeat for two weeks straight and learned every single song by heart—my toddler even learned to sing along with the beat on “La Salsa Tiene Clave," even though he still wasn’t talking!
When we finally saw Andrés live, I was blown away by his performance skills. He got every single child in our library auditorium up and moving, playing for them with such warmth and obvious joy that I was nearly moved to tears. We’ve now seen him perform live a total of three times and look forward to more concerts in the future. Andrés and Christina perform free shows across the country year-round, so if you'd like to see them for yourself, check out their tour schedule to see if they’re coming to a place near you!
Through listening to 123 Andrés, my children learned about the beauty and diversity of Latin American culture in a way that is completely authentic and which My older son can now identify the differences between salsa, bachata, mariachi, and danzón music. He's learned about the work of migrant farmworkers and added to his Spanish vocabulary such exciting words such as “astrolabio” and “barlovento.”
In sum, if you’re looking to listen to more Spanish language music in your home, I can’t recommend 123 Andrés’s music enough. All three of his albums are featured in my Spanish resource library and can also be listened to on Amazon Music Unlimited (you can sign up for a free trial through this link). Although just listening to these albums will provide plenty of language exposure for your kids—and you, if you’re learning Spanish alongside them!—you might also be interested in the teaching materials that Andrés and Christina have developed to accompany their albums —and which you can use to reinforce the topics that their music teaches (like numbers, colors, and feelings in Spanish, for example).
If you’d like to learn more about Andrés and Christina and their heart for teaching Spanish to children, I’ve got a special interview with them that I’ll be making available tomorrow exclusively for members of my Language Learning At Home Facebook group. I sat down with them at one of their last shows in the DC area and loved interviewing them about how they got started writing Spanish children’s music, their own experiences with language learning, and why they are so passionate about kids learning other languages. Join us over there to hear from them!
And now, finally, the giveaway! At the last concert we attended, Andrés and Christina graciously gifted me with two copies of their new Spanish language album, La Luna, to give away to Language Learning At Home readers. If you’d like a chance to win, here’s the easy three-step process to enter:
- Visit my Facebook page. THEN...
- Like the post announcing this giveaway. And FINALLY....
- Leave a comment on Facebook tagging a friend who might want to hear about my work or win this album!
The giveaway is open only until June 15, 2018--so make sure you enter today!
Good luck, readers!
