Activities to learn Spanish: Suffixes

Learning languages is always attached to learning skills, as many other things. Those who follow the IB curriculum have noticed that there are three main skills at beginners / intermediate level:

- describe

- compare

- reflect

Through grammar activities, in this case suffixes, we can help our students to keep building on these three skills. Actually, you can always adapt your activities to do that, but keep in mind to be creative, otherwise your students will fall into a sleepy routine.

Check the resources to get the activities with full instructions.

Developing Mr Lewin's statement a bit more: challenge your students, give them something to think about, let them make mistakes, help them learn from their own mistakes, make connections to different topics/subjects, give them tools to grow rather than just give them information.

These activities can be connected to nationalities if you are working with emergent communicators. 

Do you know the game Hangman? Practice a bit what you've learnt in this post:

Activities:

• Suffixes -oso / -ble [pdf]
• Suffixes -ero / -ista [pdf]
• Suffixes and nationalities [pdf]
• Ejercicios en línea con sufijos [Lingolia]
• Unidad de Anaya sobre sufijos [Junta de Andalucía]
• Graphic organizer: most common suffixes in Spanish [jpg] [Thanks to thelearningpatio.com]

Too often we give children answers to remember

rather than problems to solve

Roger Lewin

Lunaprofe 9/17/2016  No comment

Noun gender in Spanish: heterónimos

We've seen some rules to determine the gender of a noun in Spanish. But language is usually like life, a lot of rules don't apply sometimes. This might be the case of it. Heterónimos in Spanish have a different word to talk about ladies & gentlemen.
If we look at the word itself and we break it down we find:
hetero- which is a prefix we borrowed from the Greek language and means "distinct, different, other"
ónimo- a greek suffix that meant "name"
After the analysis we put the pieces together and we see that the buzzword means "a different name" which clarifies a bit our purpose. 
It is worth it to do this deep comprehension practices with your students, they might like to know the history of the words (sometimes;)
We are plenty of examples in our languages from this structure but two will be enough to illustrate the idea: sinónimo / antónimo.
Along with this brief lines about today's topic there is a visual resource ready to use in class.

Data is not information, information is not knowledge, 

knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom.

Clifford Stoll

Lunaprofe 3/09/2015  No comment