Family activities to reinforce English learning

The role of the family in their children's education is fundamental and undeniable. Spending quality time together, supervising activities and acquiring reading habits within the family are factors that have a very positive influence on students performance at all educational stages.

Some of the benefits of involving the family in the students' education are: obtaining better grades, better self-esteem and social relationships, better attitudes and good behaviors, or a lower dropout rate. Hence, numerous family activities such as cultural visits, reading or cinema help us to talk with them about values and to get them actively involved in their training.

Sometimes we see how students are surprised to hear movies, series or audios in English and sometimes they even have difficulties understanding it. Therefore, today's blog post will focus on movies and series as a tool to learn English, although they are not a unique resource for language learning, they are a good complement. They help us strengthen our knowledge of English, especially oral comprehension, pronunciation, intonation, vocabulary… and most importantly, in an entertaining and amusing way.

Of course, we can adapt this activity to our level of English, initially we can start watching the movies subtitled in Spanish to help us with the translation, then subtitled in English to also look at the written level and finally only the audio in English version. But obviously, this will depend on the individual's necessities.
We must not despair if at first we do not understand everything, the plot and context of the series or movie will help us not to get lost, we can also have a notebook close by and write down the words or phrases that we do not understand to look for them. It is also important to choose the series or movie well in order to enjoy and discuss as a family.

Nowadays, with digital platforms to watch series or movies online we have it very easy from home, but, if we propose an activity away from home and as a family, we can choose the cinema. Luckily, in Madrid we have some cinemas that allow us to enjoy loads of films with English audio, such as Golem, Artistic Metropol, Small Cinema Studio, Princess Cinemas, Renoir Plaza de España, Cinemas Retiro, Verdi, Count Duque Verdi Alberto Aguilera, Yelmo Cinesa Ideal 3D, Cinesa Manoteras or Cinemas Dreams.

Tell us, what are your favorite series and movies to watch as a family and improve your English?