About Bilingüitos Spanish Club
Biligüitos Spanish Club started as a community service for bilingual families who wanted their children to keep speaking Spanish outside their homes. I met many families with hispanic backgrounds where I live and they express their concerns about their children not using Spanish as much as they wanted to as English easily was overtaking their mother tongue. Of course this is normal as English is the main spoken language in England, but why not offering a service where at least once a week these families can get together, speak Spanish, sing in Spanish, dance and play, so their children can have a little taste of Latin and Spanish culture too? Helping these families and their children improving their Spanish whilst having fun was my goal when I started Bilingüitos.
Bilingüitos Spanish Club’s story:
I am from Colombia and I have lived in the UK for nine years now with my two children and husband. I graduated as Spanish-English teacher in 2005 and I am Specialist in Bilingual Education since 2016. I worked for bilingual private schools in Colombia, teaching different subjects to children. Then I lived in Melbourne Australia for two and half years where I improved my level of English and worked teaching Spanish to adults. Living in Melbourne was an amazing and life changing opportunity. I met my now husband and our first daughter was born.
After being in Melbourne we came back to Colombia for a while and I taught English to children in a private language school while we were getting everything ready to come as a family to the UK. Already in the UK, I concentrated in raising my daughter. Then I opened a childminding business after three years so I could work from home and have my daughter with me too, it was a win win scenario one would say. I started to meet other childminders, parents and carers with similar interests and the time arrived in which some parents and carers expressed the need of a session in Spanish for their little ones and the opportunity for them to have a bit of more Latin and Spanish culture around and improve their Spanish.
My Experience teaching Spanish in London
I started to teach Spanish after school in my children's school in 2019. It has been nice to teach children again in a classroom environment. Then, after thinking about how to organise myself with my other commitments, I took the decision that I could run fun sessions for the children under 5s during the weekends to learn Spanish in a very joyful way with a different approach. So I started to search for ideas, resources, materials, where to do the sessions, etc and built my starting points in planning and finding everything that I was going to need. My goal has been always to help more and more children to be bilingual offering the opportunity to enjoy learning Spanish whilst they play, sing, dance and interact with different resources.
knowing that I could help families willing to have bilingual children, I started the club in November 2019 and since then more and more families are enjoying the sessions. I have to tell you that I personally enjoy them a lot too. I feel even more cheerful and motivated afterwards. The energy from the parents and specially from the children singing, dancing, playing games whilst learning and using Spanish is something that I do not want to miss out. Spending part of my free time planning and organising all the activities so the club is always very enjoyable for all the children is something that I do very happily and with all my enthusiasm and love.
I do also teach adults during the evenings as a private tutor and have been doing it since 2017. It is different of course to teach Spanish to adults but I consider myself passionate about teaching languages, specially Spanish as it is my mother tongue, so I do enjoy to teach adults too.
Bilingüitos Spanish Club’s mission is to develop children’s natural interest for songs, dancing, play and movement whilst learning Spanish through creative sessions, meaningful resources and above all by having fun.
“Yeny is a wonderful teacher! She has plenty of resources in hand to keep the kiddos engaged while learning Spanish.
Her classes are very well structured with songs, colours and loads of props (even online clases) that all kids enjoy!
We have a really good time in each Bilingüitos class and my son loves the clases and Yeny "hasta el cielo" (to the sky) as he likes to say. !
We highly recommend it!.”
— Cecilia, one of our regular mums attending the club with her son Mateo.
