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We have been trying to get back in the habit of learning more Spanish around this house, so it couldn’t have come at a better time for us to request to review MonkiSee‘s “All About Me” (Todo Sobre Mi) Spanish DVD. 

One of the best things about this DVD is that there is so much pure learning going on. Especially compared to most “educational” shows for kids that only have a few tidbits of learning thrown into every half hour episode. This, on the other hand:

• Teaches 40 Spanish reading words with lots of fun reinforcement
• Teaches many other Spanish words and sentences through full immersion narration
• Is very professionally done and high quality
• Is very entertaining with great music, funny clips, and interesting scenes
• Has made LEARNING entertaining, rather than just having mindless entertainment with a few bits of learning tossed in

MonkiSee is a baby reading company. They believe that babies can learn how sight read when they’re tiny, and learn phonics later on.  Each word is introduced in red font as an arrow runs under it from left to right. Then pictures, videos, or songs are shown that go along with the word.

The word will also pop up between clips with different animations. I thought this was great for reinforcing the sight reading aspect and drawing attention to the word.

The video is done completely in Spanish, but because of how clear and obvious each clip is, it’s easy to intuit what the narrator is saying even if you don’t speak Spanish. This is called the full immersion method and it’s been used very successfully to learn a language, especially with children, for many years

There is a ton of playful variety in the video, including clips of children in a studio, children outside and around the house, puppetry, and lots of fun animals. There is fun background music, silly sound effects, and quite a few songs and stories.

It’s all very high quality and professional and reminisce of Baby Einstein. Except for the fact that Baby Einstein is mostly mindless nonsense and MonkiSee is packed full of learning.

As you can probably tell from my pictures, my two youngest really enjoyed the video. It’s targeted for ages 3 months to 3 years, but my 4 year old was quite entertained. I think part of it had to do with him being interested in learning the Spanish words, as well as being interested in reading the Spanish words that kept popping up.

Aria (9 months old) is at a perfect age for this, as she loved dancing to the music, was interested in the words as they came up, and due to her love of copying sounds I’m sure she will be copying words from this video in no time.

All in all I am very pleased with this resource. With how much time I spend preparing materials and teaching my kids, it is nice to have something like this that I can just pop in and actually feel good about them watching. Especially for a resource like Spanish where it is so nice to have a native speaker.