Review: Little Pim

I took Spanish since grade school at both private and public schools and still wonder if I’m even pronouncing “queso” correctly (don’t worry — I am). Embarrassing, right? It would be fantastic if my children were given the tools to excel more than I did, especially living in an incredibly bilingual city. Since we’ll be doing the majority of our schooling at home and I’m an obviously lackluster example, I’ve been desperate to find a curriculum that is simple enough for me to use and engaging enough for the kids to learn from. I must have been whining loudly enough because Little Pim was like “check out our program and tell us what you think!” and I was all “okay!” and then we were best friends forever.

Little Pim is an award-winning language learning program for kids ages 0 to 6. You can read about their philosophy here. They offer ten languages but we chose Spanish because duh. I was surprised by how much of an immersion experience it was; not a word of English is spoken. Because of this, I wasn’t sure how Elliot (who is almost 2.5 for those of you who don’t stalk me) was going to react, but he really seemed to enjoy the two DVDs we watched. They show a mixture of live action and animated sequences of familiar objects and events that are broken up into 5 minute episodes to cater to a toddler’s attention span. I was worried that the consistent repetition was going to feel like a Dora the Explorer episode (and thusly cause me to punch a hole in the TV screen because we just cannot handle Dora in this household) but it only gives momentum to the lesson and never gets annoying. It’s a great tool if you’re prepared to do the hard work of incorporating the words and phrases being learned into your daily routine (think of labeling things in the bathroom or offering a manzana instead of an apple).

Overall, I would recommend this program to anyone, from homeschoolers to parents just wanting to encourage their young child to retain a second language.

Thanks, Little Pim!