Appetizers: "Fotolabras"

I keep working on appetizers as it seems to be a great way of engaging my students at the beginning of the class. 

This time, I come with a combination of some simple ideas, visuals and connections to learn words. Visuals are most of the time the best shortcut when it comes to something we can zip in an image and connections are a very good way of helping our students to make associations and acquire words easier in the long term. Connections are usually based on antonyms, synonyms, cognates, etc. but if you find more, do not hesitate to put them into practice, your students will thank this practice.

Human beings are curious by nature

Aristotle

Lunaprofe 9/25/2018  No comment

How can we learn vocabulary?

I have been doing this in my class every year but just this year had the necessary creativity to write everything down and draw my posters to put up in my class, more my style.

The posters are to put up in your class walls to have a continuous visual reference for your students, so every time you ask them for one of these concepts they can use them to answer or refresh their memory.

In addition to the idea and the posters, you can check this post out to get to know better how to use these materials and to see more ideas and resources in action.

An idea to use the posters:  when you are teaching/learning vocabulary ask your students directly referring to one of these categories let your students explore all these categories before helping them to understand a word, let them gain their independence acquiring the language by themselves.

Another ideas to learn vocabulary:  Research is saying that memory recall increases when students write down notes. Let them have five minutes each class to hand write the vocabulary list for that class in their notebooks.  I also use an online platform [Edmodo, Haiku, etc] to keep track of the vocabulary seen in class and at the end of the week they take a tiny-little quiz on the vocabulary learnt, usually five minutes to explain five words. This activity also help them to develop time-management skills. Recycle your vocabulary. After the quiz I can find out if my students are learning or not that vocabulary. If they haven't we recycle the words they are struggling with and re-teach them in a different way [hands-on, visual, listening ...] Personal connections are crucial to place words into our internal lexicon. If the student is able to find a familiar situation that connects the new word to something she/he knows it will be easier for her/him to remember that new word.

Estrategias para aprender palabras [McDowell, 1984]:

• Escribir la palabra
• Escribirla junto a su traducción
• Relacionarla con otras palabras [por la forma o el contenido]
• Intentar recordar cómo suena
• Asociar su sonido al de otras palabras
• Repetirla mentalmente
• Pensar en un contexto en el que utilizarla
• Asociarla con un sinónimo o con un antónimo
• Formarse una imagen mental de la palabra o del objeto
• Hacer un dibujo o un signo gráfico

Resources:

• ¿Cómo aprendemos vocabulario? [pdf] [document with links]
• Posts about vocabulary [Antonio Luna]

Extra:

• ¿Puedo ir al baño? [pdf]
• ¿Puedo ir a beber agua? [pdf]

Thinking about high-level vocabulary and scoring highly in your exams? 

Click here

I have no special talents

I am only passionately curious

Albert Einstein

Lunaprofe 8/22/2016  No comment

Acquiring vocabulary through opposites [Antonymy]

The way our brain works is through connecting ideas, concepts. Everything we storage in our minds is connected, categorized, related to some other knowledge. That's why is really important not to present the vocabulary to our students standing alone, disconnected or out of context. The natural way we learn is by the context, so we want to apply that to our language classes. The factors implied in the acquisition of vocabulary in a language are multiple, so, again, the more we bring to the table in the same activity the better for our students to learn that key vocabulary.
In this case, this image helps understand the vocabulary through visuals, antonymy and context.
This image is a piece of a unit about Daily routines, which includes reflective verbs. Through different colors and pictures illustrating the actions we try to make the acquisition of this difficult concept easier for our students.
The last thing I have incorporated into the visual is the concept of opposites, which is one more connection reinforcing the learning of the concepts.

Check out more resources for Daily Routines in Spanish that I've compiled in this folder in my Google Drive.

Don't limit a child to your own learning, 

for he was born in another time.

Rabindranath Tagore

Lunaprofe 3/31/2015  No comment