5 Free Resources for Homeschool Spanish Practice
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If your homeschool student wants to learn Spanish, you’re in luck—there are many high-quality, FREE resources available online to help you! Here, I’ve listed a few of my favorites, which include materials for all ages and levels of language proficiency, from true beginner to advanced. While none of these qualifies as a complete Spanish curriculum, your homeschool student will be able to learn quite a bit of Spanish by regularly practicing with each of these (or a combination of them). Take a look to find which resources would best match your child’s needs!
Conjuguemos
Target Age: Elementary school and up
Target Level: Beginner and up
Conjuguemos is a website packed with Spanish learning games that your homeschool student can use to practice verb conjugations, new vocabulary, and tricky grammar rules like “por versus para.” It is easy to navigate and helps students retain what they learn by reviewing their mistakes and providing explanations for the correct answers. For students looking for additional instruction, Conjuguemos also provides a reference section with clear, straightforward explanations of Spanish verb tenses and how they function.
Duolingo
Target Age: Middle school and up
Target Level: Beginner and up
Duolingo is a gameified language learning app that can help your homeschool student learn Spanish on-the-go through short, daily practice sessions. Duolingo is based on a communicative model of language teaching, so it focuses on getting your child to use Spanish from the start and skips the long, technical grammar lessons. It’s fun to use and its game-based structure provides plenty of motivation for Spanish learners, so I recommend it as a great way to sneak in Spanish practice throughout your homeschool day. If you’d like to learn more, I’ve written an extensive review of Duolingo for homeschool language learning, which fully outlines what I love (and what I don’t like) about the app as both a homeschooling mom and a language educator.
Mango Languages
Target Age: Middle school and up
Target Level: Beginner and up
Mango Languages is a popular language learning program that is available for free through many public libraries. Through its innovative multimedia platform, Mango Languages helps homeschool students build proficiency in reading, writing, listening and even speaking in Spanish. I like Mango for its mix of communicative practice and direct instruction—which can be useful for homeschool students looking to learn the basics of Spanish grammar. If you’d like ideas on how to use this software most effectively in your homeschool, see my complete review of Mango Languages for homeschool language learning.
Spanish Playground
Target Age: Preschool and up
Target Level: Beginner and up
I consider Spanish Playground one of the internet’s true gems. It’s an amazing resource for parents who want to help their children learn Spanish through fun, hands-on activities—many of which we have used successfully in our own bilingual homeschool! You can search through their activities by age, theme, or type (for example, curricula versus music), so there’s something for everyone. We’ve particularly enjoyed their Spanish poetry activities, which we often use during our family’s weekly Poetry Teatime.
Salsa Spanish
Target Age: Preschool through elementary
Target Level: Beginner (best with some prior exposure to Spanish)
Salsa Spanish is a program that is popular with many of the parents in my Language Learning Facebook community, especially for those homeschooling younger kids. Originally developed as a television series to teach Spanish to young children, Salsa Spanish is now available online, with free activities designed to accompany its 42 video lessons. The 15-minute videos are similar to Sesame Street, and focus on a single Spanish concept—like food vocabulary or colors. The dialogue is easy to understand, so its appropriate for kids who are just starting to learn Spanish, although true beginners might benefit from some additional parental support. Finally, I also really like how Salsa Spanish thoughtfully exposes kids to Spanish speaking cultures, which is (in my opinion) the whole reason for learning a foreign language.
If you have more free resources to recommend, please let me know—I’m always looking for more Spanish learning resources to recommend to homeschool families!
