Recommendations for Spanish courses for a child starting Year 8

[PissPotPourri]

Hi,

My ds is changing school going in to year 8. He has only learnt French but will be joining a school where they learn Spanish- he’ll be joining a class who have already done one year.
The school have recommended doing an online course over the summer and i was looking for recommendations please. I am not a fan of Duolingo as I feel it tends to not explain the grammar structures etc, so other suggestions please.
Am open to online tutors.

Thank you

My school (I did GCSEs in 2022) fortunately didnt make me do a language for GCSEs, I dropped French after Year 8.

Had i done spanish maybe I would have been tempted to continue but we hdd random allocation

That being said I took up Spanish as a hobby now and I reccomend dreaming spanish

You watch the videos and you will learn to understand the language. It works! Is comprehensible input meaning listen to content you can understand the gist of and over time you can understand more and more

I agree duolingo is not very good

You can try dreaming spanish for free aswell - the easiest videos are superbeginner and sort by difficulty

But if you want to learn grammar for gcse purposes maybe Language Transfer course on youtube but probs too mundane for him

I am glad I didnt learn a language in this way as it removes the enjoyment for me but if he has to do it then probably gotta just work thru textbooks

I was going to suggest Instituto Cervantes because I was sure they run Zoom courses for kids over the summer, but that doesn't seem to be happening (although they restart in September). They do have this useful reading list graded by age, I think he would want to try to do as much of A1 level as possible.

londres.cervantes.es/en/courses_spanish/students_spanish/general_courses_spanish/general_courses_spanish.htm

The Open University also do some free Spanish courses

www.open.edu/openlearn/local/ocwglobalsearch/search.php?q=Spanish%20