Struggling with Spanish

One of the things on my "Bucket List" is to brush up on the spanish I learned in high school and college. I have become embarrassingly rusty over the years with no reason to practice it. In fact, the only thing I'm very good at is Sesame Street-level spanish...numbers, colors etc; although I must say, I do sound pretty convincing ordering a quesadilla a mexican restaurant. 

During the past few years, I've had a few ESL (English as a second language) students in my classroom. I've had students who were adopted from orphanages in other countries and children from Hispanic migrant families. It's fascinating for me to help them improve their English skills during their first grade year. It's made me want to take additional classes to get my ESL endorsement and become fluent in Spanish. 

That goal was in the back of my mind until school started this fall and I met one of my new students... a little boy whose family just moved from Mexico and speaks NO ENGLISH at all. That accelerated my language-learning plans in a big way ! I have checked out books to study, found online resources to help me translate and teach him vocabulary, and have enlisted help from nearly every Spanish speaking teacher in the district. I'm even listening to daily podcasts on iTunes ! It's called Coffee Break Spanish and the lessons are great, but they're taught by people in Scotland, so I'm afraid I'm learning Spanish with a bit of a Scottish accent !

I'd be doing pretty well speaking to my new student if it weren't for verbs. Conjugating verbs is something I'm really struggling with. Unfortunately, every helpful phrase and sentence I can think of, needs one. Until I learn more, this little boy is being patient with my use of partial phrases, a stab at the infinitive form of the verb and a LOT of pantomime. At least I've overcome a former habit of mine...trying to break the language barrier with volume. After all, he's latino, not hard of hearing.