Are you struggling to teach your kids a foreign language in your homeschool? Is it enough to have them fill out foreign language worksheets or do we need to make fluency the goal? What about finding a resource that is meaty enough to count as a foreign language credit on the high school transcript? We talk about all these things and more on this episode with Adelaide, founder of TalkBox.Mom
I get commissions for purchases made through links in this post.
Welcome to the show notes for Episode #138 of the Homeschool with Moxie Podcast!
As a former classroom teacher, now homeschooling mom of five, I love to equip and encourage other homeschooling families.
On the Homeschool with Moxie Podcast our goal is to inspire and encourage you with actionable strategies to take you from overwhelmed to confident in your homeschool adventure. Listen to interviews with amazing influencers in the homeschool world and beyond.
Listen to the Podcast – Learning a Foreign Language in Your Homeschool
About TalkBox.Mom
Adelaide, the founder of TalkBox.Mom, has a superpower! She says that when her family arrives in a country, they can start speaking the language from the very first day. After about two weeks, they can understand the locals, and the locals can understand them. Within a few months, you would think they’d be living there for over a year. This is what she’s poured into TalkBox.Mom by working with native speakers all over the world.
When she’s not traveling with her family and homeschooling her boys, Adelaide is at the TalkBox.Mom Headquarters in Dallas or speaking at conferences all over the world.
Foreign Language Fluency
When you think about how most programs approach foreign language instruction, it almost seems backwards! Instead of working toward fluency first, many programs jump into grammar and vocabulary that should come later. Honestly, just remember how you taught your kids their first language. If you keep these ideas in mind, then teaching a foreign language should be very similar.
Adelaide, founder of TalkBox.Mom, chats with us about how fluency works and how her program aims to bring foreign language fluency into your home. She explains the concept of “layers of fluency” and how these layers take your family far down the path of fluency.
Families can use TalkBox.Mom to teach multiple ages together. This program is well suited to homeschool families! But if you have teens, you’ll be happy to know that your high schoolers can also use TalkBox.Mom toward foreign language credit on their homeschool transcript.
Listen in on this episode to learn more:
- What is fluency?
- How can families use TalkBox to teach multiple ages?
- How does the subscription box work?
- Explain the order of the boxes.
- How long does it take to work through a box?
- How much time per day should you spend if you have young kids? High schooler?
- How can TalkBox be used for high school credit?
- Do you include assessments?
- Where can we try TalkBox for FREE?
Try TalkBox.Mom in Your Homeschool
Get access to the FREE Ball Challenge that Adelaide talks about in this episode.
Yes! You can try TalkBox.Mom for FREE by grabbing a language starter pack.
Then, if you love what you see, make sure you use our exclusive coupon codes to save on your subscription.
Use the coupon code homeschoolwithmoxie20 to save $20 off your Box & Phrasebook OR if you want to start small, save $5 off the Phrasebook with the coupon code homeschoolwithmoxie5
Foreign Language Curriculum for Homeschool
Spanish Homeschool Curriculum from TalkBox Would Have Made a Difference!
Abby: Today’s episode is a chat I had with Adelaide who is the founder of TalkBox.Mom and I don’t think I’ve ever found a foreign language product that can be used for your younger kids and for high school credit. So, what I love about talk box dot Mom is that if you’re trying to fulfill that high school foreign language credit on the transcript, this will work for you if you have a bunch of little kids in your home and you want them to learn a foreign language, this will work for you too. And with one price you can all learn from the same box.
So this was a really great chat I had with Adelaide, she has some really good information for you and some things for you to think about and I’m titling this episode, you know, using talk box dot Mom for foreign language fluency because I know from our experience, like we struggled so many times through the years trying different foreign language programs, even in the younger years, all the way through high school and the fluency bit is really crucial because if you’re like most people, I mean I learned Spanish in high school.
I had a great grade in that class, and I honestly can’t speak Spanish. Right? So, I mean I could check all the boxes, I could conjugate verbs but could I you know, speak Spanish, and get around Mexico. Okay. No, I wasn’t fluent and I’m not fluent and so I think this is a big piece missing in foreign language instruction.
I’m glad that Adelaide took a little bit of time to explain that fluency peace to us and how talk box dot mom can help in your home school if you’re interested no matter what the age of your kids in teaching them a foreign language and having them be fluent. Right? We’re not about filling out worksheets just to say we did the worksheets; we want to be able to use this. That’s the whole point of a foreign language. So, this was great.
I loved learning about talk box myself and I want you to know that at the end of this interview she does give some awesome coupon codes for you. I will also put them in the show notes at 41 more dot com forward slash 1 38. You’re also gonna want to check out the show notes because you can get a free language starter pack and give it a try see if you like the program, see if you like how it’s set up and I will have that link in the show notes as well. So, listen in if you need some encouragement and some help with how in the world can you teach a foreign language to your kids and home school no matter the age, you will love learning about talk box dot Mom. So, here’s my chat with Adelaide and I hope you enjoy.
Okay, we are here. Adelaide, thanks for joining us and this is a fun topic. I’m going to spill the beans. I’m gonna talk about all are terrible uh you know, backstory with learning a foreign language. But before we get into my story, go ahead, and introduce yourself to my audience who are you and maybe like even a little bit of the backstory of why you started talk box dot Mom.
What is TalkBox.Mom?
Adelaide: All right, thank you so much Abby. It’s so fun to be here and with everyone who’s listening because you are my people. I love this. So, I’m happy to be here. So, I am the creator of talk box dot Mom where we help families to start using a new language in your home the same exact day you start So you don’t study for years and struggle. No, you start using the language with your family and it’s a real thing and you make progress immediately and then you continue that journey, which is fun.
I started TalkBox.Mom because I needed to speak another language with my family overseas and I have been a language learning failure. I’ve been through different disasters too where you know I took it in high school and then I realized I couldn’t speak Spanish even though I took it in high school, I studied languages at the university, I did a study abroad. I even worked in Europe, and I had my first son there and I thought I’ll speak to him in German and realized I don’t know how to speak to a baby like I can speak at work, I can speak at church but no idea on how to say poop went up your back like just no idea.
So, I was like well I lack a lot of, a lot of things and we left Germany and we’re in the states and then we decided to homeschool our kids while we traveled around the world and so we’re slow travelers, we want to go somewhere and like build a community kind of build a home, be there and then move on. So, we went to brazil for six months and I thought wow well speak so much Portuguese, but it just doesn’t work like that.
You don’t just like start speaking a language because you’re somewhere more often, people are so excited to speak English with you so you have not as much opportunity as you would think and so I just really wanted to talk to my kids and I had brought a college textbook of Portuguese a verb conjugation book and I paid someone to make me flash cards so we could like hit the ground running you know like a teenager just make me some flash cards and oh my gosh I just, I’ve laid it all out and I had my little kids there and they were a little at this time and then you could see the view of the beach in brazil out the window and I was like before we go to the beach we are going to learn to conjugate a verb and my like sassy like 34 year old, he was like mom, we did not come to brazil to sit in a room and I thought you’re right and oh my gosh what am I doing? I didn’t teach my kids English through grammar and vocabulary cards, right?
I have this child who’s like 34 putting me like putting realistically what’s happening in English without ever doing a formal grammar lesson, he couldn’t even like read or write, you know fluently at that time. So, I thought wow, what I’m doing is not how language actually works. And then once we started learning Portuguese through what, how fluency really works in two weeks we were speaking and understanding Portuguese and I was shocked because I thought it would take so long and I remember somebody that I had met at church there Abby, she had talked to me the first week and I told her like I don’t know Portuguese right?
And then two weeks later she heard me telling my kids to be quiet at church, taking one of them out of the, out in the hall, asked him if he would go to the bathroom, him telling me he did us going in there, me helping him and he came out and she looked so furious and I thought that that’s strange and like I don’t know this woman, she looks so angry and she was said in Portuguese, you said you don’t speak Portuguese and she looked at me like I was a liar and I was like you know like oh my gosh because I had just learned it.
But it’s it was so it was such a drastic change that it was surprising, and I was surprised because I told her I don’t speak Portuguese and then I like kind of felt my mouth you know, I was like oh my gosh I do speak Portuguese. Like what? So, it blew my mind how really fast you can start using a language and how you can do that, and I mean you don’t have to go so intense to learn a language.
It doesn’t have to take up so much of your time. So, it just it really was eye opening on how that could be done because I knew from the university, you know how they teach a language, but statistics show people who take Spanish in high school or language in high school or even at the university, they can’t speak the language. We have a big gap, right?
Fluency in Foreign Language Study is Most Important
Abby: I’m in the same boat as you. I did Spanish in high school, and I actually could do all the writing and conjugation and all that, but if I ever had to talk to anyone, I wouldn’t, I wasn’t fluent actually and what almost matters more
Adelaide: right being able to talk, I was like the fastest verb conjugated in my Spanish class, but that has served me not exactly,
Abby: so this is okay, so we really do, I think as homeschoolers tend to approach like any kind of learning, I mean we should know better because we’re like of course how do you naturally teach your kids anything you naturally teach them, think about like when their Children learning to talk, I agree with you and we had such a bad experience when my kids were little and I have shared this on my podcast before.
We were living in Canada. We were living in New Brunswick, which is a bilingual province. So here I am, I knew Spanish, my husband kind of new French from growing up in Canada, but not really well and then we were like, well let’s teach our kids French well, I couldn’t help them, I didn’t know and everything that we tried was this backwards approach probably because we weren’t getting, we weren’t being fluent in it.
So, I mean we have struggled now. I’ve graduated one from high school to others have already gone past the time of struggling through a foreign language and we just have never gotten a good fit for our family this way. So, talk to us about how talk box dot mom is different, what is, what do you mean by fluency and how does this all work?
Adelaide: Okay. I just love this and I’m sorry like that you went through that because I just know how it feels being a language learning failure because it’s not that you didn’t put in the effort. Like you said you were good at conjugating and then you like you’re like I couldn’t use it and then for your kids in Canada just like you are saying I couldn’t help them.
Parents are the Most Successful Language Teachers
Adelaide: But I in my opinion, I’m like you can’t help them because you are a mom. Moms and dads, we are the most successful language teachers in the world, right? We have a higher success rate than any university at teaching a language. We have babies and toddlers all over the world that can talk at a native level and that’s the most coveted level of a language. So as parents, we already know how to teach a language, we need to do it that way, right?
We don’t want to do it like you said the backwards way so that that takes us to yeah, what fluency really is because a lot of people ask like are you fluent or you know, there’s just not quite understanding what fluency is and that’s important to understand, to know how to become fluent, right? To know what it is.
So, fluency is the ability to easily and accurately use the language. So, talk box dot mom, we start with fluency. Alright, so you will learn to use the language in your home, and you’ll start with full phrases because if you learn a vocab word, you’re gonna know the word for la Puerta the door. But how do you say, don’t slam the door, keep the door open, close the door. Right? How do you use it?
We use full phrases. So not just vocabulary words and we use things that can be used in your home because that’s how you learned your first language. So, one of the first things you might learn to say your kids to say is I’m hungry, right? That’s a great phrase. They’ll use that a lot. There are so many ways to be able to use that phrase. So, when you learn it, you have the audio, the native speaker audio and you listen to it and you tell your kids she’s going to say I’m hungry or if you have an older child, they can say, okay, the next phrase is I’m hungry and then you’ll say it with her.
It’s important to note when you start saying it with the audio, it doesn’t matter how you sound scientifically. It takes a couple of weeks to a couple of months to hear the sounds. So, if you nitpick at how you’re saying it, how your kids are saying it, it benefits no one. And it also kind of breaks people’s morale, right? Like oh you’re not saying it right? So, you’re like, I don’t want to do this, someone’s not picking, I’m done. So, you just want to have fun saying it.
And then you practice the phrase in different situations. So, for my kids, I’d be like, okay, when do you say I’m hungry? And they’re like, when you say bedtime and I’m like, yes, okay. So, I would tell my kids okay, bedtime. And then they’d all say tango hombre and whine to me in Spanish. And we would start using that.
So that phrase Tengo hombre or I’m hungry if you’re doing Spanish for example, I guess French my French is not amazing. But it’s like chiffon. You would use that, that phrase we speak Spanish and German in my home. So, you would use that phrase in the language that you’re learning. Uh and it becomes real to you because you’re using in your life and your kids are using it in their lives. So that’s, that’s fluency. It’s falling right out of their mouth. And when they hear it being said, they’re fluent in that they understand immediately what it means and that’s what we work on through these phrases now.
You might think like, okay well you’re just learning phrases, but this is exactly how babies learn. They hear phrases being used in their home, then they start mixing and matching those phrases. So, if you have ever said in your home, I need my coffee and then you tell a toddler you can’t have a cookie, you’re gonna have a toddler going around saying I need a bad cookie, right?
Like that’s how language works, and your brain is still really, really good at that. So, with our program, you, because of how fluency works are focuses on using the language. So, you could be a native speaker and your kids reply back in English but you use us because we give you the roadmap to get you both on the same page using the language. You could also be a parent who has never ever done say Japanese and your child loves anime and they really want to do Japanese.
You can do it with them, you can learn Japanese with them and use the language with them. Or you can be somebody who we have many families who have bachelor, the parent has a bachelor’s degree in the language, and they can’t use it and when they start using it they pieces are put together because it’s so applicable that we often hear people say I’ve passed up everything that I did in my degree in just a couple of boxes because they’re using it, wow.
How TalkBox.Mom works
Abby: So, explain the box concept because this is going to be different. Homeschoolers are sometimes used to, okay, I’m going to buy the textbook, you know, I’m going to buy the workbooks, right? And we’re all about or maybe, you know, and maybe a video to go with it or something but like to explain how the boxes work.
Adelaide: So, we have boxes and the reason we have boxes is because if we give you the whole year, you might be really overwhelmed in your whole year might look different than somebody else’s whole year. So, we don’t want to define so strongly how much you have to do in a year.
If you’re doing it for high school, there are requirements and we do have those laid out. we can go over that, but so each box has three challenges in it and you can take a week per challenge or a month per challenge. So, you decide how often you want your boxes to come. Each box covers a specific area of your life that you go really, really deep into that topic. So, you can be talking a lot about it.
The first box covers snacks and kitchen and the fluency approach in that box is consistency. We want to help you learn to be consistent and to build phrases into your day, because I mean we all set the table during the day at least once, right? So, asking you, yeah. So, asking your kids to put the plates on the table, put the spoons on the table right? You’re not just learning the word for spoon and fork and knife, but you’re learning how to put it on the table where you’re learning how to ask for different things in your kitchen using different foods.
So, you so you go through these phrases, you only work on 1-5 phrases at a time, and you work on building those into your day and then you add more in your day or week or month. However often those phrases come up, but you work on using those phrases and then you work in more phrases and more phrases.
You set a time period for like I said, a week or a month and you just work on as many phrases as you can comfortably get through during that time frame. And then you move on to the next challenge. You don’t do it all that sometimes scares people, but we’re like, trust us, you don’t need to do it all yet. So, you move onto the second challenge. You work through that.
Then you go through the third challenge after your time is up and you work through that challenge. When you go back to review the first challenge, the things that you missed. You’re gonna learn so fast because you’ve been using the foundational phrases there and you’re able to add those other words and write those phrases you use, they sat for a couple of months and you look back and you’re like, oh, this is easy. What was I worried about when I have this? So, it’s just very fun.
And then you can move on to your next box. Some families take a month per box and some families we go three months, but you can also pause and there’s no fee or anything for pausing. It’s like up to your family how fast you want to go. It’s a subscription because it goes in a specific order. But it’s not like a scary subscription. We don’t want you stockpiling talk boxes.
Okay, we’re not doing that. So, some families they also you can just choose another date. So, some families might take six months to do a box. It just depends on how much you want to do. We see families who are overseas, definitely doing a box a month because they really earnestly, really need to talk. And then we see how families who are doing boxes slower, but they have more time with their kids. So, it’s okay, right, They have a couple more years that they’re uh so, so yeah, with the boxes we have a book.
The phrase book has many different phrases you use throughout your day. Whereas the boxes go really deep. So, the phrase book is great because it will break up the specific topic. So, say you’re doing snacks and kitchen? Well, you can also uh you can also say is the mail here, right? Did the mail gets delivered? Did you get the mail or something?
My kids do is I don’t know the elevator button is the hot topic in our family right now. So, they know how to say that they get to push the button or that person push it, you know that’s all in the phrase book or what button to push. So, and I mean that’s how your kids, right? That’s how they learn a lot of their numbers to so numbers and colors, everything is covered naturally how you use it.
So, the phrase book is very complimentary. So, most families to start get the box and the phrase book together, so really really nice to help them. and then you don’t feel so overwhelmed and of course we have a community to help move you forward in your boxes. So that’s how we do things you have boxes, and you continue to move forward.
How Much Time Is Required
Abby: So, because you can do it at any pace, that sounds perfect for families that are using it for multiple kids together because I mean you’re not feeling like you said like overwhelmed like oh there’s a new box coming, we better. You know, like we’re not ready for it. It sounds like you can really customize it to your family speed and what, what works, how so, and it also sounds like mom is very involved, how much time a day is that going to take say if you have mainly younger kids?
Adelaide: Yes, okay. I love this question to do talk box dot mom, you do have to have a parent do it with your kids because it’s that we’re capitalizing on that wonderful relationship you have with your child and the time you spend with them, what’s nice about it is you do already spend time with your kids, right? So when, when you get really, really busy in life, that means you have more opportunities to use, your phrase is you’ve built them into your day. So, it’s not like extra work, but the work that you do is there’s just three steps.
You choose your phrase from the guides and all of our phrases, like I mentioned, they build on each other. Each box has different fluency approaches that works together very nicely. So, you choose your phrase from your guide, then you practice your phrase to practice your phrase that looks like listening to the audio for that phrase. And if you’re doing 1 to 5 phrases, you know, maybe a phrases like 10 seconds long.
So, you listen to that and you say it with it and then you practice it in a couple of situations. So, if your kids are younger, pick one phrase and do one phrase for the day and that might take you 23 minutes to do. If your kids are older, you can do five phrases and you can choose more situations to practice in and you can practice much longer. And we also have principles and games.
My kids, there’s some days that like at game time at night we’re like, oh, we’re gonna play this game. And I’m like, oh my gosh, it’s two hours past your bedtime. Like go to bed. Like how long have we been playing this for? What’s like, what’s going on with us? but then there’s days where we just do it for two minutes. And then the idea is you use the phrases during your day. So that’s just the time you would naturally already have.
Using the Box in Real Life to Build Foreign Language Fluency
Abby: That makes sense now. So, what actually comes in a box. So, when that box arrives, what will people find?
Adelaide: Yes. Okay. So, it’s uh, an immersion program and it has two different parts. We have the, the, the companion app or website, which has the audio, and it has like the track to follow. And it has also bonuses like principles in the community.
And then you have everything in the program printed for you. All the core challenges come printed. So, you don’t have to do that. So that’s what’s coming in the box. All your language guides that you need for that specific box. So those two go together to create this immersion program to make in your home. When you get your box, you’ll open it up. It has a welcome note on it that explains what’s happening in each challenge, what you’re learning. And then inside of that there’s three different folders for your three different challenges.
In the first box, you have the language guide that goes up in your kitchen and you want it where you can see it because you’re gonna refer back to it, that you want to use it in real life. It has phrases on it, like, are you hungry to one person, two or more? I’m hungry, we’re hungry, I’m really hungry, we’re really hungry. You know, things like that, where you’re learning to conjugate without saying conjugation time, you’re doing it naturally, just like in English, my kids can hear if somebody said something in the wrong tense or they can hear like I would never say I be, they’d be like, what? Right?
You can hear it. So, you get an ear for it, which is really, I mean how you learn grammar in English to you really don’t have an ear for it. And then then it has phrases like, do you want certain foods? Yes, I want those foods here they are. Do you want more? Please don’t have any more will out. Do you want a banana or whatever instead? Are you all done? All done? Let’s clean up through trash. I put your plate in the sink on the counter, in the dishwasher wherever it needs to go.
So, you really use those phrases and you’re learning so many grammar concepts, different things during that. The second one is too beautiful. 11 by 17 inch posters and they have lots of different snacks on them, but they’re not a vocabulary chart. You start integrating those snacks with sentences and using those sentences. So that’s really nice. I even from my, my younger, my youngest child whenever I brush his teeth, I’ll be, I’ll remind him what he ate throughout the day as I brush it.
He like thinks I can see it in his mouth, but we’ll do that in a language. So, you know, there’s different cute things you can do for older kids or younger kids because I mean talk about that. Mom is customizable because you practice it. The situations that work for your kids, like I mentioned like my kids, when do you say I’m hungry? Right, So it’s very customizable in the box.
The third challenge our label cards, they’re not flashcards, you put them up in your kitchen where the item is. So, if I open up, open my cupboard, you’ll see inside of it. It has a card that has the bulls and then sentences about bowls, which is put the balls on the table. Do you need a bowl? Can you give me a bowl please?
And it has like things, one of my favorite phrases that I use all the time, it goes in the silver juror, and it says this does not belong in the silverware drawer. So, lots of practical things, phrases for using your dishwasher. If you have a dishwasher, if you don’t, you can, you know, skip that card using your sink, your oven, your microwave, right.
We always tell people the microwaves beeping. So, if you have a microwave using that, the table coming to the table, setting the table, sitting down at the table, chairs pushing in chairs, just everything you can use around your kitchen because that’s going to help you with consistency.
So those are the things that, that come inside the box, inside the companion app or website. It’s not something that’s meant to babysit your child. So, if you don’t do screen time, your kids don’t have to look at the screen. If you do allow them to do it, they can go and listen to the audio on their own. But it is better to practice it with the situations and in practice it with that. So that’s what the, the app has all the audio there. And lots of trainings that we do to help you out as well as I mentioned, principles and then activities submitted by our community and activities that we share.
Spanish Homeschool Curriculum
Abby: wow, is there is there one language that’s like the most popular that you see people choosing or is it quite the variety,
Adelaide: definitely the most popular is Spanish. That is the most popular. And I mean that’s our proximity like for the United since we’re selling from the United States right? doing that, but then our second is French and that’s also are approximately I would say to Canada, so that definitely makes sense or it’s just also charlotte mason approach of course and I love that like charlotte mason since they were so close to France, it makes sense to learn French were close if you’re in the US, you know, you’re close to a lot of Spanish speaking countries that kind of transitions over the area following that would be German and then I would say mandarin and Japanese,
Abby: wow, that’s neat now. I mean this makes so much sense for families of younger kids multiple ages because I mean homeschool moms are all about like what can we do together? We don’t want to have everyone doing their own individual stuff.
High School Foreign Language Credit
Abby: But I am so intrigued by the high school aspect because most language programs, it’s either only for high school or it’s only for the younger kids. Like it sounds like talk box, it’s really for any level depending on how deep you’re going. Talk to us about high school because this is hard as homeschool moms, like if we’re not fluent in the language helping our high schoolers get legitimate credit on the transcript and not feeling like we’re cheating? Like how do people use talk box dot mom for high school language credit. Can you talk us through that?
Adelaide: Yes, absolutely. Just speaking about credits in general, just always a reminder. Always check with your school district, check with your state, all those things to talk about. Some mom does fit into the hours. Uh So that’s really nice. We have so much, so much wonderful content in our program. The reason that I love talk about stepmom for high school is because of the families who have taken languages in high school or have bachelor’s degrees and how much more they benefit from the program.
Also, students who use us for high school. Uh We have a wonderful family, the daughter, she was just so happy. She she worked through her boxes and then I explained to her like the clip test is a test, right? It’s there to trick you write like this test, you have to know how to take a test to do well. So, I said you have to do a test prepped and then I said you could do a grammar review with a grammar book as well just to make sure. but when she took the test, she was, she got, she got two semesters of her credit that she needed for university, so she doesn’t have to take that anymore.
But what she said was that it was so much of our varied vocabulary and the, you know, like the phrases that we have and how we’re using them that helps so much because on that test there’s so much speaking part and knowing how things should sound. It’s made also to trick native speakers trying to get credit. So, it isn’t an easy test to me. Like if it was in English some of the questions, I would genuinely be confused because they’re like talking about like whatever, eating different foods and then they’re like, does she like chicken but eat rice or not like rice? But each and you’re like, wait what?
Like I just heard that conversation once. but you know you’re prepared to use the language. That’s the idea of talk box dot mom. I would much prefer that your child doesn’t check a box and say yes, I took Spanish in high school and tell an employer that right? Like I took it in high school, I would rather them in an interview, be able to use their Spanish. Right? I would rather that when a client or a customer comes in, your high schooler can use the language. So really the question is, what do you want your child to get out of this foreign language experience? Do you just want to get it done because you have to do it or do you want it to open up future opportunities for education for work and for service?
If you’re more on the second question, then tuck box stepmom is definitely for you. So for high schoolers, the mistake that’s often made is that your high schooler is at A level in English where they can already read, write and do grammar and so you want to transition that over and you’re like, okay great, we’ll do that with Spanish. And then they’re like, I’ll read harry potter in Spanish and then they read two pages and they look up every word and they’re fatigued right there, like burnt out there.
Like I’m not going to do this based on how fluency works. When you go to read something in another language, it needs to make sense in your head without translating it to English. So, if you are already working on the fluency layer of talking and listening, then when you go to read something, you know what it means. And if you don’t, you can look it up in a Spanish dictionary and know what it means, right?
So, if you lay this foundation of talking, listening on top of that foundation, it’s like a pyramid shape, you have reading and copy work and then on top of that you have dictation. So, hearing something and transcribing and be able to write it down and then you have grammar works really well when you have examples to use it from. I always like with my kids whenever they’re like, I tell them, oh you have to use an in front of words that have valves or valve sounds. And both of my kids have told me like, no, that’s not a thing.
And I’m like, well say try to say a with orange and they’re like an orange and I’m like, exactly right, because they have those reference points, it leads to uh subpar literacy results when you start with the grammar concept and then try to teach examples. Hmm. So, with our Spanish programs, something new that we’re having come out are these fluency companions and they build on the phrases you use in your box so that you can do the reading and the copy work, the dictation and then the grammar,
So it’s close to, it’s close to charlotte nation approach working in that way because it works, it works really well. So, for high schoolers, it’s definitely laying that foundation of talking and listening. Being able to do that. And then you can decide to do we want to do reading, writing and grammar or not, right? And it’s really your choice.
And this is wonderful for students who have disabilities as well because they can just focus on that talking and listening and you can record either using our phrase planner or just in a notebook what phrases you worked on that day and your student can just write that down and there’s your, their written work, you know, that’s a lot. And you can also write how you practice in those situations for, for your written work each day. So, either using the phrase planner or notebook and then as you work through your challenges throughout the year. Again, you’re going to have so much of the language that you can use, which is just really nice.
How Many Boxes Should We Complete for High School
Abby: So approximately how many boxes would your high schooler need to do in one year for that to equal you know you’re 120 hours or three credit hours. However, they’re figuring that for their transcript.
Adelaide: Yes, you would want to do three boxes per year, and we have nine boxes total. We also have like other Adams and different things you can do. But I would focus on the three boxes with the phrase book and use the phrase book throughout the two years or the three years.
And then again if you wanted to add in the fluency companions as they come out, you don’t have to, you also can just work on copy work on your own. So just depending, but for the first fluency companion that’s coming out, it’s going to be the digital version is going to be free so you can try it out and see if you like it. So that will be like a bonus with your box.
But if you spend three months per box about 99 months if you’re semesters or years a little shorter than nine months that you can go a little faster in some areas. So, it fits into the year, it goes to the 120 hours. And again, you’re choosing how long you’re practicing and how many situations you’re practicing in. So, you decide how you fill up that that time as well. So, it just works really well. And anybody can go and see more information at TalkBox.Mom/highschool on how to fit those steps into the schedule as well.
Abby: So, you’re essentially using the exact same boxes, say your younger siblings, but the high schoolers doing like an hour a day, the younger siblings might be doing five minutes a day. Is that kind of a very general overview of how it differs. Your high school is going much deeper.
Adelaide: Yes, so such a great question. So, for example, we have we have a protein in our home and a eight year old and then I don’t know what were our whole life is crazy. Okay? And then we have a three-year-old. So with the older kids we will spend more time going through the phrases, especially because we’re further along in Spanish and German, we recently added in Korean and it’s much shorter time, right? We just do it a shorter time.
And what’s so funny though is the baby, we call him the baby, he’s through, but he’s definitely the baby and we he will speak in Spanish or he will speak in German, but he has not put in the same amount of time. And that’s because this fluency is the same with English in your home. You have kids with all different levels of English. But because you keep using English, everybody keeps moving forward. Mm hmm. Right.
So, when you have kids with different, different times that you’re spending, you might have the high school or practicing in more situations or getting a little faster at things with the principles if you’d like to or you could have them have more of the responsibility where they’re choosing the phrases for the next day. They’re writing them down if you want, you don’t really have to do a lot of prep work with our program.
But if you wanted to, you could have the team to it. But a lot of it’s just open go. And then for the younger ones, yeah, they would just be doing a phrase or two and then you keep using those phrases. So, everybody’s on the same page, you don’t want to fall into this trap. And native speakers, they fall into this. A lot more people who did it in school where you talk at your kids instead of with them.
So, you don’t want that to happen. Talking at somebody would just be using every phrase you possibly can and like be like, oh, you should just understand me, this is a really bad approach. If your kids can already speak English, if they’re a baby. Yeah. Talk at them. But once they can talk back, they’ll be like, I’m going to choose the easy way, and this is not it. So, you’ll have a lot of pushback, a lot of resistance in that.
Whereas if you’re like, hey, I just want you to use these 1 to 5 phrases, then they’ll be on the same page and they’ll do that. So, so younger kids, yeah, you don’t have to spend as much time with them. They’ll keep hearing it. They’ll keep moving forward and older kids you can do that. There’s really no, you can’t really leave somebody behind. If they have at least said the phrase with you and they know you’re using it.
Using TalkBox.Mom for Multiple Ages as Foreign Language Curriculum
Abby: Ok. So essentially a family with like all different ages, they can get the one box every three months or whatever it ends up being. And I mean use it for everyone. It’s one Price 1 box. Use it for everyone.
Adelaide: Absolutely. And what’s fun is when you have lots of different ages, sometimes I’m really jealous of people who have teens with little kids in their house because you can have the teens do the program with the younger ones, right? They can be doing that time.
They can be practicing the situations and when they’re, you know, in this role of teaching, they’re going to learn even more. So, if you don’t have that that age gap, what I do is I have my kids teach me and so they’ll have me say things. So, they’ll say to me mom, you know, put your plate in the dishwasher and then I’ll do it and they’re like, who smokes that worked? Right. So it’s it’s fun for them. So, you can kind of be the baby too.
Abby: Now there was one other question I had, and I think I saw this on your site. So, like high school, The other thing that homeschool parents really like, you know, stress about is okay for something like this. How do I give them a grade on their transcripts? So, you do have assessments for the high schoolers, Is that right?
Adelaide: We so yes, we you can do it too. You can do it different ways for Spanish. We just had our tests come out and we’ll be having those for, there’s certain languages that the most high schools will allow you to do or universities. So those ones are coming first.
So, we have questions for your child to assess where they’re at. And it’s really, it’s really nice because it shows you how much you really do know of the language. So, it’s more like a celebration of what, you know, if you are using your phrases you will know. So, we have like a question on there, for example, let’s say uh, on it. It’s like it’s a grammar question and it says like tango, blank hombre and then it has a couple of choices. It says mui mucho or mutua. If you’ve been using talk box dot mom, you know, it’s mutua because you say it all the time, right? Where someone coming in from a grammar approach, they have to run so many rules through their head, and they’re stuck in their head.
That’s why I talk about someone is essentially better because you’re not stuck in your head, and you know how it should sound. So, the assessment is really nice because you look so good on paper because you can do these really difficult grammar things or knowing phrases and context. You can do those things and it just looks it looks really good because it would be really difficult for somebody learning the hardest way possible.
Their grammar vocabulary to be able to do. because you’re just passing up years of trying to learn a language. And then if you have another language though, it’s really easy to assess your child. You can just ask them like how do you say five phrases and you know, in Spanish or whatever and not Spanish like French. And then what are these phrases mean? Right, and then give it to you. So, if you wanted to assess them that way, you can assess them that way as well for both. But you’ll see more assessments coming out.
Try TalkBox.Mom Foreign Language Curriculum for Free
Abby: that’s awesome because that’s very that’s like a big deal. That’s a big deal. If we have a transcript, we need something on there. So that’s awesome. So where can people find out more? I know we’re going to put links in the show notes, but I believe if we want to try it for free, you offer a free language starter pack for all your languages. Is that right?
Adelaide: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. That’s at tuck box, not mom slash ball and please put the link in there with your link. and you can try out first. The for the first thing you try out is just to kind of show you, Yeah, I can do a language with my kids. So we have the short ball challenge where with your kids, you play with a ball and you will see your kids talking in and understand that language as you play and it can be for older kids or younger kids when you are learning a language though, I just have to say it is a humbling experience because you don’t know anything and sometimes you have to prep your older kids for that.
I mean I have been at places like the Goethe Institute in Berlin and seen, you know, exact learning German and there’s these men in their suits and they have their sleeves rolled up and they’re blocking like chickens and moving like dogs and trying to say things to each other because that’s how you, that’s how you learn, right. and so it is like, you know, you’re like, oh, I have to relearn some things. so, it is humbling and I mean it’s humbling for anybody though. So, you’ll play with the ball in the language, you’ll understand each other and you’ll use it. It’s very fun. You can start with one phrase or use all of them, right?
Depending on how old your kids are, but it just shows you that you can start understanding the language without starting with vocab and grammar jewels because that comes, you know, grammar comes later. And then the second thing in it is you learn how to build phrases into your day, and we teach you that with using, getting in, getting into your car, right? And getting buckled and all those things.
So, you’ll learn how to use phrases and that because that happens all the time. I mean, how often do we say, like, go to the car and then one of the kids are still playing Minecraft or something and their sibling is like out of the car or you, you tell them to go to the car, but now they’re riding the scooter around it. Okay. And then, the third thing in it is, we have a mini snack chart for you to go through.
So that will help you out to see, you know, if this is a language program of your dreams because we would like you to, to use talk box dot Mom if you really want to speak in the language, if that’s something that’s fun for you and that you want to do with your family. One of my favorite things about talk box that mom that our families say is that you get to grow together as a family and that’s, that’s what’s so fun.
You look back and you’re like look at what we all did together, look at this and so it will show you how that feels to do that. It’s much different than being in your family room trying to say a word into a microphone in your teenager crying because she swears she’s saying it right, but the program doesn’t think she is. So, you try it and now you’re mad at the program and everybody’s in tears because like I mentioned, it’s impossible to sound good when you start. So, it doesn’t make any sense that you’re doing that when you’re starting so it can just be really fun experience. So yeah, definitely try out the starter pack.
Abby: Yes, I think you must have been a fly on the wall in our home because that was exactly our experience. Very frustrating yelling at the computer definitely happened over here. So that was crazy.
Adelaide: my goodness. One thing I want to say really fast about foreign language to be aware of and it’s doing shadow activities. Shadow activities are things where you think you’re doing the things like to paint to get good at painting, you have to paint to get good at riding a bike, you gotta ride the bike to get good at talking in a language, you gotta talk in a language you don’t need to go and just learn vocabulary words, go and learn grammar things, try to try to sound perfect. There are so many people who speak English and they don’t sound perfect, they have an accent, it’s fine, like I’m still their friend, I don’t care.
And so, there’s a lot of shadow activities that I see people doing where they’re just listening to music or you know, just watching shows and we want to be aware of kind of doing those things and spending our time. Not effectively. There’s a lot of well-meaning apps out there that, that teach you phrases that you’ll never use like the purple horses in the church have not needed that. Okay, it hasn’t happened yet. Hopefully not. Right. So, so we just really want to focus on what our goal is. If your goal is to talk, let’s talk, let’s talk in the foreign language together.
Exclusive Coupon Codes for TalkBox.Mom
Abby: Sounds amazing. And this has been really interesting. I’m thankful that you guys reached out and said like, let’s talk about talk box dot com dot mom because I mean, I think this is really gonna be valuable for a lot of people listening today, so we’ll send them over for the free starter pack and they can check it out and see how they like it. any final encouragement for my family’s listening today.
Adelaide: Yes, if you want to get started, start with your box and your book and use the code for $20 off it’s homeschool with moxie 20 and if you just want to get your toes wet and start with the book, use the code homeschool with moxie five and those will be linked in the comments. Right? So, anybody that would listen and see that start with those codes, make sure you love it.
You can always pause, and you can reach out for help. We’re here to help you. But if this sounds like if you have had it in your heart, your child has in their heart that they want to be able to use the language, please start, please use the language with your family because it will change your life. Our goal at talk box dot mom is life changing results. That’s our mission. We know that if you can really use the language in your home, you will be able to serve people that you weren’t able to serve before you’ll be able to have education and work opportunities that you didn’t have. This could be even for your styles, for yourself and your home, even though you’re learning with your kids, this could be for your child’s future. So many things can open up because you can use a language. So, if you feel that speaking to your heart, act on it, act on it and do it.
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