Where the correct article is reinforced
Quick, quick! Is it ‘el papalote’ or ‘la papalote’? Did you know that every noun in Spanish is either masculine or femine? And therefore its article is either ‘El’ or ‘La’ respectively.
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In English, nouns have no gender, so identifying the gender of nouns in Spanish can be very tricky when teaching Spanish to kids that are native English speakers. Even proficient students who have been studying Spanish for years still struggle with this! It is important to master the genders of nouns because gender determines the form of many adjectives that describe it. (The more you master this, the more fluent you will sound in Spanish!)
If you lived in a Spanish speaking country you’d have loads of exposure to the correct article (and therefore gender) for every noun so you would learn this almost subconsciously. You would not be thinking about the grammatical rules for determining gender. You would just ‘know’.
As your child reads the FabuLingua stories and interacts with objects depicted on each page, they too will hear the correct articles for lots of nouns. Then, when they play ‘The Articles Game’, where they have to quickly guess the right article, they will subconsciously start to use their memory to make guesses.
Kids soon figure out that to be good at this game, they need to listen carefully to the stories more than once. And they realize they need to explore every object or interaction on each page, because that is where you’ll find a lot of secret clues for this game! (When they interact with objects on a page, they learn that new vocabulary, along with the correct article for it!)
Watch how this child subconsciously taps into what she read in the story and interactions to take some good guesses. It’s an exciting way to review vocabulary and the corresponding articles.