Hablamos Espanol

Over the past few weeks, several little instances have led me to the decision to teach my family (and/or learn with them) to speak Spanish.

A local Hispanic church congregation plans to start meeting in our church building in September and the minister of the church will have his office there as well. I am hoping that our congregation will form some relationships through this partnership. Our church has also taken several family mission trips to Mexico to serve a family and church with whom we have a relationship. To help build these relationships, two of our ministers were recently discussing the possibility of holding Spanish language classes for our congregation. In addition, a woman at our church, who teaches ESL in the local schools, has also recently begun a ministry to provide the Hispanic population in Knoxville with information and resources and just to help them where needed and I think it might be pretty awesome to help out with that.

All of these things had already gotten me thinking about brushing up on my Spanish. I took five years of Spanish in junior high and high school - actually four if you take into account that I actually skipped Spanish 4 - so I wouldn't be learning the language from scratch.

Then I recently stumbled on a blog that I really like, so I was going back and reading a few of the past posts. The blog is written by a mom who is homeschooling her children, including teaching them to speak French. That's when it hit me - I could teach my kids to speak Spanish! I don't really know why we all need to learn Spanish, but I have heard that young children learn second languages pretty easily. Plus there are numerous language, literacy, social, and cognitive development benefits.

Besides, it just seems like God has something up his sleeve...

So, I'm getting ready to do some digging to figure out how this will work for us. I hope it doesn't end up just being frustrating and time consuming. I'll definitely need to find some fun resources. Wish me luck!