el arca y el barco

The children love the song "Noé hizo el arca." Even the youngest will sing "arca" with me. Today we sang about a small boat.

This gave us a chance to return to words like grande and pequeño (big and small) and to review numbers up to seven. In the song about the small boat, we learn a synonym for pequeño: chiquito. Your child probably brought home a little boat on a popsicle stick. We used that little boat to sing this traditional song called El barquito. You can hear a sample of it here:


If you purchased the José-Luis Orozco CD earlier in the year (see below), El barquito is the third song.


The song is about a little boat (barco chiquito) that can't sail because it is so small. Seven weeks pass and it still can't sail. The lyrics are:

Había una vez un barco chiquitito (repeat 3 times)
tan chiquito, tan chiquito, que no podía navegar.
Pasaron una, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis, siete semanas (repeat 3 times)
y el barco tan chiquitito no podía navegar.

There is another verse that we did not sing this week. We may add it later, but it is linguistically more complex and doesn't include very much practical vocabulary.

In some classes we reviewed a few pages of Corre, Perro, Corre (Go Dog Go) both because there is a scene where the dogs are on a boat (barco) and because we went to see the English version of that play at the Lexington Children's Theater last week.

I have begun to do signs for the children outside of the context of our songs to see if they know the Spanish words just by seeing the sign. Try this sign and see if your child says mis amigos or this one to see if he/she says, ¿Cómo estás? If not, it is fine because we have stressed receptive skills this year. Try again in a few weeks and see if he/she can do it. It will come!