Teaching Your Kids Spanish

It's not a bad idea to teach your kids Spanish, especially if you live in the United States. In fact the language outstrips English as the most commonly spoken language in the big urban centers.
When looking for a Spanish course for your child make sure it is organized in a way that will make sure they learn fast. Make sure that they can learn the easy consonants and vowels first. A good course will teach them how to pronounce the more difficult consonants secondly. An effective course will then proceed to go on to teach your child all about greetings, plurals, genders, nouns, adjectives and pronouns. Your child should also be taught how to conjugate verbs and understand the complicated stress and accent marks.
The good news is that most kids learn how to speak Spanish quite quickly as it is quite an easy language to learn. It is not as complicated to get to know as French or English. The most difficult thing about it knows which direction to put accent or stress marks so that you are pronouncing words correctly.
If you need to learn Spanish too you could also go to night school or to your local Learning Annex to learn Spanish. Most high schools and universities also have courses that are labeled Spanish for beginners.
If you want to teach yourself Spanish there are all kinds of programs that you can find online that can help you accomplish this goal. Some of these language programs are available as audio disks and others you can get as MP3s. These teaching programs really do vary in price so it really is worth it to shop around before you buy.
It is also a good idea to read reviews of these language learning products to make sure that they will indeed help you become a fluent speaker. One way to find out if these products are good is to read what other customers have had to say about them. You can find reviews of almost all language teaching programs online.
You might also want to try a cultural immersion program. This is the scenario where you send your kid to another. He or she learns the language simply mingling with the local people. This method of learning a language works really well for younger people.
You and your kids can learn the language by attending the local schools, seeing movies in Spanish and getting a job that forces you to only speak Spanish. The best country to do this in is Spain but there are islands in the Caribbean, such as the Dominican Republic where mainly Spanish is spoken. It's easy to pick this up. You know you have mastered a language when you start thinking in it too.

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Does Your Kid Have Lazy Eye?

Lazy eye is a confusing disorder. This is because the eye does not always look 'lazy.' It is a disorder between the coordination of the brain and eye and it usually starts in childhood. It causes the body to favor one eye over the other.
Lazy eye is a disorder of the coordination between the eye and the brain, usually Amblyopia is the medical name for it. The problem is one eye does all the work while the other gets weaker and weaker.

Poor blurry vision in an eye that otherwise seems normal is the main symptom. It is caused by poor transmission of the visual image to the brain from eye in childhood. It is a temporary condition in most cases — thank goodness!

By the way it is possible to suffer form this in both eyes. That is very rare. The one eyed ambyopia is more common. About five percent of kids (one in twenty) might suffer from it. Many people are not even aware they ever have it. This is because it is normal to have slightly stronger vision in one eye.

Sometimes this eye looks so lazy it can actually stray. Mainly it causes poor depth perception. This is rare. Having a crossed eye or turned eye is a completely different eye condition. It is called strabismus. However lazy eye and crossed eyes and turned eyes seem to be used all the time to describe both ambyopia and everything else.

The way to determine whether or not your child has this condition is to take him or her in for a special test called a visual acuity test. It is not done with the letter chart we usually associate with determining eye problems.

A large number of kids with lazy eye go unnoticed until they have their eyes examined when they get older. Therefore, comprehensive vision evaluations by a trained and qualified vision professional are the best idea even for pre-school kids. You don't want your child going through school with undiagnosed compromised vision! Yet it can so easily happen.

Treatment options for lazy eye include glasses, drops, and certain vision therapies, possibly including the use of a patch. Sure you're kid will look like a pirate but at least he will be able to see the chalkboard. Good thing Pirates of the Caribbean was such a hit and pirates are so cool. However expect little girls to have a harder time with corrective eye patch than boys.

You also need to catch this early. Recent research has shown it can be treated until the kid is seventeen. Improvements are possible at any age but the best chance of correcting completely is catching the lazy eye while your child is still a kid.

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