Washington, Apr 18 (EFE).- Don Quixote, Frida Kahlo, Christopher Columbus and Pablo Picasso teach Spanish to children on "Ole&Play," a CD on which Gaby Moreno and Carlos Barroso perform.
The idea for the album arose within the context of "Isabella & Ferdinand Spanish Language Adventures," a program in Washington where the youngest children learn the language via music and culture.
"Ole&Play" takes a tour of the past in Latin America and Spain in 13 songs that help children understand and learn about painters like Fernando Botero and historical personalities like Ferdinand and Isabella.
It was, in fact, a situation surrounding the monarchs that gave rise to the album: "La cancion de Isabel y Fernando" (The song of Isabella and Ferdinand), the school's official song.
"The parents of the youngsters kept asking, 'Don't you have that song that the kids can't stop repeating at home recorded?' It was then that we decided to write more songs and collect them on a record," Pilar O'Leary, one of the founders of Isabella & Ferdinand, told Efe.
The album, which goes on sale on Tuesday through iTunes and Amazon.com, was produced by Andres Castro, the winner of several Latin Grammys.
Emmy nominee Gaby Moreno and Carlos Barroso, the winner of several music contests in Spain, sing the songs composed by the school's musical director, Spaniard Francisco Revert.
The album was created with the aim of becoming a Spanish-language teaching tool for children in the United States, a country where Spanish-speakers are the population segment that has grown the most over the past 30 years, according to the most recent Census data.
O'Leary, a Colombian-American, founded the Isabella & Ferdinand school two years ago along with Alexandra Migoya who, like her, was looking for a place where her children could learn Spanish within the framework of the Hispanic culture.
"At home, we speak to them in Spanish, but that's not enough to make them completely bilingual. And we weren't able to find a school where they taught them not only the language but also the situation in the countries where it's spoken," O'Leary said.
The Isabella & Ferdinand center tries to teach so-called "universal" Spanish, and it hires teachers from different countries in Latin America, as well as Spain, who help the children get to know and recognize the various regional accents.
This panoramic view of the Hispanic world is reproduced on the "Ole&Play" album, where indigenous people of the Americas, Fernando Botero and flamenco all play a part.
"Sometimes people complain to us that we've dedicated a song to the conquest of Christopher Columbus, but we want children to understand why Spanish is spoken in the Americas," Migoya said.
The album, which starts off with the first sentences of Miguel de Cervantes's "Don Quixote," tells the histories of Latin America and Spain in a fun way to the sounds of Latino rhythms.
"Music is one of the most efficient mechanisms to help children retain information. They never forget what they learn in the songs," said Revert, the composer of the album's melodies and in charge of directing the musical part that accompanies all the classes that are taught at Isabella & Ferdinand.
Half the students at the center are of Hispanic origin but the rest are Americans without any family ties to the Latino world, although their parents have noted the importance of understanding and speaking that language in the United States.
