If your child is learning a second language, summertime practice is essential to help them retain what they learned during the school year. We’ve all heard about the dreaded summer “brain drain.” The key to avoiding it is to keep your child’s brain engaged all summer long. And it’s especially important for learning a foreign language, which requires repetition and practice.
Here are seven fun ways your child can practice their foreign language skills over the summer.
PALO ALTO, CA – May 17, 2018 – PandaTree, one of the leading providers of live online foreign language lessons for kids, today announced the launch of PandaTree for Preschoolers, a series of Mandarin Chinese or Spanish lessons for children, ages two to five. A first for bringing live online foreign language learning to the youngest of children, this new series of 25-minute lessons offers language exposure during a critical development period for language acquisition.
We all know that everyone makes mistakes and that it’s a critical part of the learning process. It’s often hard, however, for students to move beyond the fear of embarrassment, especially when schools and testing generally reward being right. And for tweens and teens wanting to impress peers, the risk from making a potentially embarrassing mistake feels even greater.
When I recently attended the “meet the teacher night” at my daughter’s high school, her Spanish teacher kicked things off by sharing a bit about his philosophy. “I want kids to make mistakes in my class,” he said. “If they aren’t making mistakes, that means they aren’t trying new things. That’s why in my class, I reward mistakes.”
I wanted to hug him. Getting students to feel comfortable making mistakes in front of others can be a real challenge. And my daughter’s teacher was on to something – making mistakes is absolutely critical for foreign language learning.
We all know that everyone makes mistakes and that it’s a critical part of the learning process. It’s often hard, however, for students (especially older ones) to move beyond the fear of embarrassment, especially when schools and testing generally reward being right. And for tweens and teens wanting to impress peers, the risk from making a potentially embarrassing mistake feels even greater.
Palo Alto, CA– November 2, 2017 – PandaTree Inc., the language learning company, announces the launch of its proprietary interactive foreign language learning platform for kids. The new platform allows students to talk via live video with their PandaTree tutor, while interacting with PandaTree’s proprietary, standards-based language curriculum. The company also announces it has raised an additional $1.5 million in a seed equity round.
The new WebRTC-based platform supports a more interactive and fully integrated curriculum. During lessons students can be doing a virtual 3D tour of a Mayan ruin or the Great Wall of China with their tutor, working on a project, or playing a game. “The new platform boosts learning because students are engaged. We view these innovations as just the start of a much more immersive virtual foreign language learning experience,” says Rich Matsuura, PandaTree co-founder and product lead.
By Dimaris Barrios-Beltran, PhD and Kristina Klausen, MBA
How hard is it for kids to learn a particular foreign language? That is often one of the first questions many parents ask when considering foreign language education for their children. Because Spanish is similar to English in several ways, and because many aspects of Spanish and Latin American culture are familiar to students in the United States, Spanish is considered one of the easier foreign languages for children to learn. In this post we’ll look at some of the features that make Spanish easier for kids to learn, and in part two we’ll look at some of the challenges that Spanish learners face. Continue reading “Is Spanish a Difficult Language to Learn? Part One Features that make Spanish easier than you might think“
Learning a new language is both exciting and challenging, and the younger your child starts a second language, the more easily she will learn to speak it. Immersion programs for children, particularly Spanish and Mandarin, have been growing very rapidly and are often over-subscribed. If your child is lucky enough to be learning a foreign language in an immersion program, you may feel unsure how to support her–especially if you don’t speak the language yourself. Don’t worry. There are ways to help your child on the language-learning journey.
What if there was one thing you could do that would help grow your child’s brain, improve her problem solving skills, help her do better on standardized tests, prepare her for better paying jobs of the future, deepen her empathy and cross-cultural understanding and give her tools to unlock a lifetime of greater connections and richer experiences? You would be all in, right?
Continue reading “Reasons Why Children Should Learn a Foreign Language”
PandaTree was launched to help kids learn foreign languages in a way that is fun, motivating and effective. We’ve been thrilled with the response from parents, who, like us, are looking for ways to offer their children the opportunity to learn a foreign language, knowing the benefits only increase as the world becomes more globalized. PandaTree has been discovered by families around the world – including Norway and New Zealand! We are grateful to our students, their families and to our 20-and-growing amazing tutors.
Continue reading “Welcome to the PandaTree Blog!”
