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.

Parenting Tips
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If Your Baby Has a Nightmare

We've all had nightmares. A lot of people still experience nightmares, which disturb their sleep patterns and get to be a headache. But how many moms remembers their first nightmare experience. Or, for that matter, how many recall their first 50 nightmares? Probably no one can, and it's because they all occurred in the first year of their lives. So when your child awakens in the middle of the night visibly and audibly upset , your child cannot tell you what happened, so you have no way of knowing whether it WAS a nightmare that awakened the baby in the first place!
If the child were older and could tell you so, and you knew it was a nightmare for sure, it would be much easier to proceed with your consoling. So what to do? What are the signs?
One way to figure out whether the baby has had a nightmare is to take note of her regular sleep patterns. Then make certain the baby isn't sick or ill with fever, causing wakefulness. If the baby awakens suddenly at a time when she is most often sound asleep and then resists attempts to soothe her back to sleep, odds are she may have just experienced a nightmare. Adults usually dream most vividly after one half-awake period in the middle of the night, and babies are no different. If your child sleeps through the night, the nightmares could happen in the very early morning hours.
So if the signals are there and you believe it's a nightmare you're dealing with, one possible reason could be separation anxiety. If the baby is away from the parent for too long, it will create stress, which is a leading cause of nightmares at any age. Another reason, also a cause of nightmares throughout out lives, is the result of something disquieting or upsetting witnessed by the baby occurring somewhere close to bedtime. So whatever the reason, you've now encountered an agitated child who won't go back to sleep so easily.
Now back up a bit if you think the quick answer is to take the weepy toddler into your own bed. It could very well work as a short-term fix. But it's generally known that the child could get too attached to the option. Try staying with the baby, talking to reassure, and don't forget the all-important therapy of physical reassurance. Hold, stroke and rock the child until the terror has lifted and the good night's sleep can be resumed.

Parenting Tips
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