A Valuable Spanish Podcast For Kids That You Need To Know About
This is a great Spanish podcast to listen to with kids! One of the first steps that you can take as a Spanish language learner or someone who is raising a bilingual child, it to expose them to as much fluent Spanish as possible. This podcast is family friendly and checks all the boxes!
My daughter and I spend a lot of time in the car. Every day I drive my daughter 25 minutes to her preschool before I head on to work. Every afternoon we drive 30 minutes from my parent’s house back to our house. With almost an hour together in the car every day, I knew that I needed to use some of that time to augment our Spanish learning.
We had already discovered audiobooks and Spanish nursery rhymes at this point, which had served us well in the car. Audiobooks are great and have a lot of benefits for language learning because they’re prerecorded and slower than an actual Spanish speaker would be in daily conversation.
For some of our favorite nursery rhymes and audiobooks, check out these posts here!
4 Secrets To Learning A Language With Audiobooks
3 Charming Nursery Rhymes To Boost Your Baby’s Spanish
Wonderful Nursery Rhymes That Will Make Your Baby Bilingual
Table of Contents
Why listen to Spanish podcasts?
Podcasts are a valuable resource in their own right. While they function similarly to listening to Spanish books on tape and Spanish songs, they offer a few benefits of their own as well.
Since my daughter doesn’t have many native Spanish speakers in her life, I knew that I needed another type of resource to help build her fluency skills. I decided that a podcast would be a good resource because the audio would still be clear, but the speed might be faster.
Also, I was hoping that my daughter would benefit from hearing two Spanish speakers having a back and forth dialogue in real time.
This post contains affiliate links. If you click an affiliate link and make a purchase, I earn a small commission which supports this blog at no additional cost to you. Please see the Privacy Policy for details. Thank you for helping to keep my blog running – I appreciate the support!
Spanish Podcast: La Estacion Azul De Los Ninos
I hadn’t really thought much about podcasts since previously I had only listened to the news in the car, but one day I stumbled upon Radio 5: Radio Nacional de Espana.
Radio Nacional de Espana releases many podcasts and some of them are great for adults and teens that are looking to practice their Spanish listening skills (for another great podcast check out ‘Contando Cuentos‘).
Under Radio 5, I found a weekly podcast directed towards children and their families called, La Estacion Azul De Los Ninos.
The first time I listened to it I had no idea what anyone was saying! I thought that they spoke too fast and that the Spanish accent was hard to understand. I had reservations about listening to this with my daughter since I was worried she wouldn’t be able to understand or that she’d find it boring.
But after our first listen together, it became a weekly tradition. I realized how important it was for her to hear native Spanish speakers talking at a normal pace, and that it wasn’t too hard for her to understand, it was just hard for me to understand. After we stared listening regularly one of the things that we appreciated most about each episode was the pattern.
Each episode followed a schedule with various types of programming. My daughter likes, “la pregunta de la semana” because she likes to hear kids calling in and answering the question. She also likes me to pause the episode so that she can give her answer to the question! Here are some of the highlights from each episode:
Los libros azules:
The start of each episode includes, ‘los libros azules’ where they describe a book in Spanish that they are recommending for young readers. After they talk a little bit about it, they read a small excerpt from the book out loud.
They usually include a mix of books from board books to chapter books for beginning readers. It’s a great way to be exposed to some new titles in Spanish and hear what books are popular for young Spanish readers.
Here are some of the books that we learned about on the show and that we later purchased. It’s always great to get a good recommendation!
Concursos
Each episode also contains a quiz or bit of trivia. There’s always one clue at the beginning of the episode and one at the end. Our favorite series of trivia questions was ‘animales escondidos’ where they would give two clues that described an animal and you had to guess which animal it was.
My daughter and I are always on the lookout for the final clue at the end of the episode to guess the secret animal, or learn more about the famous woman, or whatever the clues are for that week.
La pregunta de la semana:
My daughter’s favorite part is ‘la pregunta de la semana’ where they ask a question and invite children to call in with their answers!
A question might be, ‘have you ever been to a farm? What did you see?’ We usually pause the podcast and talk about what our answer would be before we listen to what the children call in with. My daughter also likes listening to other children speaking Spanish and hearing their funny answers.
If you’re in the car or even in your living room at home and looking for some more Spanish immersion, this podcast is a great way to listen and practice with the whole family!
Each new episode is released on Saturday in Spain and becomes available on podcast soon after. We like to listen to the new episode each Monday morning as the start to our week. If you’d like to listen, follow this link to their website, or look for “La Estacion Azul de los Ninos” wherever you listen to your podcasts!
What do you listen to to improve your Spanish? Leave me a comment!
For more resources on raising your bilingual kid, check out this section:
Bilingual Kids: Spanish for Ages 3-6
Happy Learning!
Don’t forget to subscribe here and get the latest posts and resources delivered straight to your inbox!
I must be blind… What’s the name of the podcast?
It’s called, “La Estacion Azul De Los Ninos”, it’s a lot of fun to listen to. I’m not sure if all of their episodes have made it to podcast since the COVID-19 pandemic hitting Spain, but you can always listen to past episodes and enjoy them just as much! I hope you enjoy using it to work on your Spanish!
Cannot find the button “listen” or “download the podcast”.
Hello! I added a link into the post and I’ll put it here as well 🙂
https://www.rtve.es/alacarta/audios/la-estacion-azul-de-los-ninos/
If you have a podcast app on your phone, you can type in the title, “la estacion azul de los ninos” and it will come up. They have a Facebook page as well if you’d like to access the audio there.