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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Breathing Yoga for Stress

Stress is a factor that often contributes to ill health in moms – especially heart attacks and hypertension. All stress and tension is hard on the heart as it makes it pump more strongly.
If you are a person who is naturally prone to stress or if you work or home environment is overly stressful, you need to learn how to keep your stress levels down.
Doing so is the only way that you will be able to reduce your blood pressure if stress is a major contributory factor, so learning how to effectively combat stress is essential.
There are many different things that you can study and learn about which will help you to master the art of controlling stress.
The first thing that you should consider is taking up a discipline or hobby like yoga or meditation that can teach various different techniques for keeping stress under control.
The best thing is that as a starting point, there is a great deal of the information that you need to see whether yoga or mediation is ‘your thing' on the net, for free. This means that you can start learning and practicing yoga or meditation in the comfort of your own home and that once you have mastered the basics, you can then take things another step further by joining a local group or class.
Practicing yoga is a great way of acquiring the discipline that you need to be able to switch off at those times when stress might otherwise take over. As you can read, there are various different types of yoga that you can practice ranging from ‘gentle' (sometimes called ‘hatha') yoga to the far more impressive sounding ‘power' (or ‘vinyasa') yoga.
Another factor about yoga to consider is that there are several yogic asanas (poses) that are believed to help relive high blood pressure as well. Various asanas such as suryanamaskar (the ‘sun pose'), matsyasana (the ‘fish pose'), vajrasana (the ‘thunderbolt pose') and shavasana (‘corpse pose') are all useful for reducing high blood pressure with regular practice. This is obviously another good reason for thinking of taking up yoga.
Even something as simple as disciplining yourself to breathe deeply and slowly whenever you encounter a situation which otherwise might become stressful can be an extremely powerful way of learning to control your emotions. As with the other disciplines highlighted in this chapter, there are many different ways of teaching yourself how to breathe deeply and slowly when things start to go wrong, but perhaps the easiest strategy for learning how to control your breathing is to adopt the Pavlov method of learning to breathe deeply.
It is one that I would definitely recommend you adopt to teach yourself how to breathe deeply and slowly whenever stress threatens. Do this and you can significantly reduce the amount of stress you feel in your life, which should in turn help to reduce your hypertension.

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