Berlitz Kid's Spanish Picture Dictionary (Berlitz Picture Dictionaries)

Rating:
Summary: Pictures and Sentences
Review: I started to learn spanish recently on my own in order to teach my newborn daughter spanish as she grew up. I bought several adult learning books along the way. Spanish By Association was my favorite to get me started building vocabulary right away. It also threw in a dozen or so simple and easy to use grammar rules. I recommend that book.

However, I started looking at the kids spanish learning books recently and found there are some approaches in them that the adult books don't cover. First, the Berlitz Kid's Span Dictionary uses every word in a spanish sentence, which my adult spanish dictionaries don't do. I personally like to see words used in a sentence and most dictionaries, nor flashcards include senteces. Secondly, in McGraw-Hill's Spanish Picture Dictionary, each page is a common scene from life; kitchen, living room, garden, park, etc and all the objects in the scene are label in spanish and english. I love this idea and I have made xerox copies of each room page and taped in that room in my house. As parents, we use these scenes to help us remember and learn the vocabulary for each room when we are in at the time. So, when we are in the kitchen, we use and learn the kitchen words as we cook. It seems this would work for kids also. They could study the words for each room anytime they were in there.

The Berlitz book does mix in some of the "scene" pages, but they are so scattered and random that they don't have the impact that the dedicated scene books have. If they would have put them all in one location in the book, it would have been more compelling. I still like the book for it's pictures and the word being used in a sentence. The Cat in the Hat Spanish Dictionary is similar to this book. It has the word in a sentence and cartoons for each word, but doesn't have the scene pages. Kids my like the Suess book for it's Suess drawings, but I think the Berlitz book has just as much good info.