Palabras de alta frecuencia/High Frequency Words

One of the best things about teaching literacy in Spanish is its lovely decodable-ness.  Okay, so maybe that's not a word but it is nice to work with a language that doesn't cause constant confusion with all of its exceptions.  

While we don't have to worry about SIGHT WORDS in Spanish, we can help young learners become fluent readers more quickly by teaching high-frequency words in Spanish.  

Here is my list of 100 high frequency words in Spanish based on several research-based lists.  You can download it for free here.

Last week, I was in a Kindergarten classroom in Stephenville and saw this teacher's great way of keeping track of the high frequency words that students are learning.  Each week, the teacher gives the students a card with the new word(s) of the week and those are kept on a ring.  Students can practice reading their words and refer to them during writing.

 I snapped the picture below in a first grade classroom in Mesquite.  The teacher had made his own version of this game and was using it as one of his center activities.  The students would walk around the room to the other students and ask them to read the word they were wearing.  They were so quiet and loved it!

Here is another fun and simple activity to practice with students in small groups so they can later play on their own in pairs.

Flashcards Activity-My Pile, Your Pile in Spanish from Mesquite ISD on Vimeo.

While it is important for students to be able to read the words in isolation, the real purpose of studying these words is to be able to read them in context.  Even students that don't know all of their letters and sounds can begin to read simple, repetitive texts.  

Hubbard's Cupboard has quite a few printable books in Spanish with high frequency words (scroll down and look for "Black and White Student Booklets" in Spanish).

The Rigby Colección PM Básicos readers are perfect for practicing words in context.  

What are your favorite ways for helping your students practice high frequency Spanish words in isolation and in context?  I love hearing your ideas!

Clasificando palabras: Laying the foundation in PK/K

I am a person with a deep desire to be organized.  Unfortunately, I was not born with the "naturally organized" gene.  Whether it is my classroom, my home, my car, or my Pinterest folders, it takes me a long time to determine the necessary categories for organization.  However, once I allow myself the time to think about logical categories and labels for sorting, I can quickly convert an area of chaos into an area of order and future productivity.   Of course, new areas of chaos always pop up!  Sigh...

It wasn't until I was in my sixth year of teaching that I learned that sorting and categorizing was not just for colorful bears and Unifix cubes in PreK and Kindergarten.  At a staff development session at the beginning of the school year, our literacy coordinator showed us how sorting could be a form of word study and teaching spelling in all grades.  Up until that point, I had hated teaching spelling.  The traditional way of memorizing, testing, and forgetting a list of words just did not seem like best practice.  Words Their Way truly changed my teaching life!

As the book says:

Categorizing is the fundamental way that humans make sense of the world.  It allows us to find order and similarities among various objects, events, ideas, and words that we encounter.  When students sort words they are engaged in the active process of searching, comparing, contrasting, and analyzing.  Word sorts can help students organize what they know about words and to form generalizations that they can then apply to new words they encounter in their reading.

There is so much more I could say about sorting and, since this is MY blog and all, I WILL!!!  :)  But, I am not going to say it all at once.  For today, I wanted to share a picture and some videos from some PK/K  classrooms I have visited that are laying an early foundation for word sorting.  

This picture comes from a Kindergarten classroom using the Estrellita reading program.  We found clip art representing all of the sonidos iniciales and studied them in the chunks outlined in the program.  As we studied them, the students were able to practice sorting them.  By comparing and contrasting groups of beginning sounds, the students were able to learn the letters and sounds so much faster than if they had just studied a letter a week.  This type of sorting did not just require rote memorization but rather "searching, comparing, contrasting, and analyzing".  Who doesn't want their students practicing those skills?

This amazing Kindergarten teacher's class does a whole class picture sort according to the sonidos iniciales and then the students go back to their seats to do the same sort individually.

Stay tuned for more Clasificando palabras posts in the near future!  I would love to hear about your own experiences with word sorts in your classroom!

¡BASTA CON LAS SÍLABAS!: A Word Study Review Game

Scattergories has always been one of my favorite board games.  Several years ago, I attended a training on word study in my district.  One of the games that we played in English was Word Family Scattergories.  You can see another version of this game here.  Like the typical bilingual teacher, I was quickly thinking about how to transfer this over into my Spanish Word Study class.  Using syllables or word parts, the game ¡BASTA CON LAS SÍLABAS! was born.


My second graders loved it and it became a favorite activity for students to do whenever they finished their Word Study work early.  At the end of every six weeks, we would play the game as a class.  Using this gameboard or just using the patterns we had studied that grading period, I would write the patterns on the board.  Students thought about the patterns and noted their words on mini dry erase boards.  I would have them stand up and we would go from student to student asking them to read aloud their word for the #1 pattern.  If the other students heard a word that they had written down, all with that word had to sit down.  After each student had read his/her word, all of the students still standing received one point for their words.

Making TAREA Work for Everyone

Last night while I was cooking dinner, I overheard the news anchorman say, "We're talking about homework.  How much is too much and is it even necessary at all?"  You can see the video from the broadcast here.  (Updated 8/21/13: The original video is not available but here is a link to a similar report.)

As a teacher, I have never been a huge fan of homework.  It brings up so many questions:  What assignment do I give?  How much do I give?  What horrible thing logical consequence happens to those that do not do their homework?  How do I grade homework?  Do I grade homework?  How much weight do I give the homework grades?

After processing those questions for many years and working through my Masters in Reading where I read lots and lots of research, I developed my own personal philosophy about homework. 

Homework SHOULD NOT be:
- a time where I expect the parents to do the job that I should have done during the school day

- the boring work that I do not want to make time for in my schedule
- an assignment that has never been practiced with my guidance in class
- unexpected and unpredictable
- frustrating for parents, children, and the teacher!

Homework SHOULD be:
- congruent with my beliefs about what good teaching and instruction should look like in my classroom
- a reflection of the learning that we are doing in school
- consistent and predictable so that families can plan for their lives outside of school
- a time for the student and the parent(s) to bond with each other as they talk and learn from each other
- challenging but rewarding for both the parents, children, and the teacher!

Based on this philosophy, I made this weekly homework packet for my second graders.

In class, my students and I kept individual dialogue journals about their reading during self-selected reading time.  "Lectura en casa" was a miniature extension of these journals. 

The entire packet was turned in on Monday mornings and a new packet was sent home on Monday afternoon.  I did not check the packet every day.  Wait a minute!  I know what you're thinking!  What if they just filled in the whole thing over the weekend?  That probably happened but there are only so many things you can control.  I read this article and it confirmed my decision. (Update 8/21/13 - The linked article is now only available to Choice Literacy subscribers.  Sorry!  However, this more recent article by Kathy Collins is excellent!)

While the majority of the writing in our classroom was in a writing workshop format where the students could choose the genre and topic, for "Escritura en casa", I would write a simple prompt that would ideally inspire some discussion at home before writing.  I asked students to tell how they got their name, to share their families' funniest moment, to retell a special memory with a relative, etc.  This was my favorite sheet of the homework packet because it really gave me a window into my students' lives and the anecdotes provided a means for me to build relationships with the parents.  It was amazing how a comment about one of these stories could quickly light the mood at a parent-teacher conference!

Spelling homework!  Ahhhh!  Since I have entered the world of parenthood, I hear more horror stories from my friends with school-aged children about the dreadfulness of spelling homework.  I think spelling is the area of more teacher malpractice than any other subject area but that is a whole other bowl of frijoles!  Anyways, I use the Words Their Way method for spelling during the school day so that spills over into homework.  On Mondays, students sort their Spanish words according to the patterns for that week.  On Tuesday, they do a no-peeking writing sort with the Spanish words.  On Wednesdays and Thursdays, they repeat the process with their English words.  

All in all, it is a pretty painless process and my students' scores on the Friday assessment were much better than they had been when I required things like writing sentences, rainbow spelling, pyramid spelling, alphabetical order, etc.  To all of my former students who were required to do those assignments, please consider this my open letter of apology!  

My math assignments varied throughout the school year.  This page was in the packet for the majority of the first semester while students were working on automaticity with their sums.  During class, we discussed various strategies for visualizing numeracy.  We played several different games and made flashcards.  Students were to use those flashcards as well as playing cards or dice to practice their sums at home.  Embedding the table as an assessment tool was helpful in keeping the parents informed about how well their children really knew the facts.  This is one of those concrete tools that parents really love because they can see progress over time.  I got a lot of good feedback from this page.

Because my total packet was three pages front and back, I alternated between using the Science and the Social Studies pages each week.  Most of the time, I would write a question asking students to apply our unit of study to their lives at home.  I would often find the questions or prompts in the textbook teacher's guides.  The topics were sometimes imaginative (What would it be like today in your house if electricity had never been invented?) or exploratory (Make a list of five items in your house that are attracted to your magnet.).

So, there you have it!  It's not perfect and I will continue tweaking it to make sure that homework is truly purposeful and powerful in bridging learning from school to home.  If you would like to download my homework packet for free, you can do so here.  Let me know what you think!  I would love to know how you make homework work for you in your classroom!

Estudiando palabras: Palabras con r/rr

Do your students struggle with spelling in Spanish? Even though Spanish is a much more transparent language than English, there are plenty of confusing letters that can give our students problems. I've created a unit focusing on the sonido fuerte and sonido suave of the letters r/rr based on the methods described in one of my favorite books, Words Their Way. You can download the printables for $1 here!

No matter what the grade, I think picture sorts are a great place to start a unit, especially with the letters r/rr. Ask students to identify whether the r sound in each picture sounds fuerte or suave. When students are able to do this successfully, begin using the word cards. I would suggest using Level A for first grade, Level B for second grade, and Level C for third grade. Of course, you could also use all three levels to differentiate in one grade level!

After you sort the word cards based solely on the sound, ask students to look closely at the r or rr in each word. Use the second sorting mat to divide the cards in the sonido fuerte column into two more categories. Ideally, your students will figure out this pattern on their own but if they are still new at sorting, you may need to point it out.

If you have time during that lesson, have the students wipe their mats clean and do a speed sort a few more times. Throughout the rest of the week, students can pair up and do a no-peeking sort that will help them remember and apply the pattern. To do a no-peeking sort, have one partner read the word while the other partner writes the word in the appropriate column on the sort mat (sticking the mat in a sheet protector with dry-erase markers works great!). The first partners checks the spelling and then they switch roles.

Here is a game board for a spelling center. Place the word cards on the mat. Each student takes a turn drawing a word card. He reads the card and then hands it to the person to his right. He writes the word on a dry erase board or scrap paper. The neighbor checks the spelling. If it is correct, the player rolls a dice to move his railroad car forward. The first person to make it to the train wins!

So what do you find are the most confusing letters in Spanish for your students? Let me know what spelling units you would like to see!

Spelling & the Bilingual Learner

Don't forget about our giveaway of Blooming Writers/El escritor floreciente! You can submit comments until noon CST this Friday!

I received this note a couple of years ago from one of my former second-graders. At the time, he was in sixth grade and had been in US schools for five years.

I was DELIGHTED to hear from this very sweet and smart young man! The first few times that I read the note, I simply focused on the meaning:

To Miss Grover
How are you? Remember when I used to read Green Eggs and Ham. I would like to see you really soon. Oh, and I'm still really organized. I still want to meet Amity [my daughter].
Sincerely, [student's name].



Gradually, my attention turned from the meaning to the mechanics as I realized that this was not a note from a second-grader. This was a note from a middle-schooler and one that had been one of my brightest students in second grade. There were some errors that jumped off the page because they are not age-appropriate for a typical 12-year-old:

- justo - We find this type of error cute when reading the writing of primary students. Yet, I can guess that a typical middle-school English teacher or any other content teacher is not going to have a clue what Juan meant with this word. I would love to see more samples of his writing to see if this is an error that appears often or if this was a one time slip.

- orgonaizde - A primary teacher would give this error a lot of credit for getting in most of the sounds. But, again, would someone who is not accustomed to reading the writing of an ELL be able to read this word? What makes me the saddest is that he failed to use his #1 resource, his native language, to help him spell this word. If he had used the cognate organizado and simply changed the last letter, he would have spelled the word perfectly!

-sensirly - Here is another example of failing to use that native language as a resource. If he would have used sinceramente and understood that -mente is usually the equivalent suffix of -ly, he could have come so much closer to the correct spelling.

Please understand that I am NOT criticizing Juan nor am I criticizing his sixth grade teacher. If anything, I want to go back and have words with his second grade teacher!!! :) This note was a wake-up call for me that we have to do a better job teaching spelling to our bilingual learners. Being biliterate should be an asset to spelling instead of a hindrance but we have to teach students how to use what they know. Too often, our spelling instruction remains compartmentalized within each language.

Next Wednesday, we are going to start a series about improving spelling for our bilingual students. Stay tuned for free printables and lessons in Spanish and English!