Dual Language Linky Love - 3/18/13 Edition

I'm back on the blog and wanted to share some of my favorite links that I have found in the past few months in case you missed them on my Facebook page:

• California has posted their Common Core Language Arts Standards in Spanish.  The standards that are specific to the Spanish language are noted in blue.  There is a lot of emphasis on the use of the accent in reading and writing.
• At The Dual Trio, three dual language teachers share some of the Spanish songs they have created to teach content in Spanish.  These songs are so easy to find in English but Spanish ones can be challenging!  I have posted some of my song creations here and here.  Don't judge.  It's hard and I'm not a musician so please share your own ideas!
• Calico Spanish's YouTube channel has a growing list of Spanish music videos available that include introductory Spanish language for SLLs but also include content-based songs that would be great for native Spanish speakers in the primary grades (days of the week, vowels, weather terms, etc.).
• Do you have a parent meeting or open house coming up?  This site has lots of fun tips with appealing graphics in Spanish to encourage parents and child to READ!   
• Spanish Playground has free printable bookmarks with rhyming phrases along with a whole list of more rhyming phrases that would be great to incorporate into your daily routine.  With my preschoolers at home, I have found that incorporating fun rhyming language into the activities we do every day makes us feel like we have lots of inside jokes AND it naturally trains their ears to hear the rhymes.  My youngest just turned three and she is a rhyming machine!

Thanks so much to all of you for continuing to visit I Teach Dual Language!  Visit me on Pinterest at http://pinterest.com/iteachdl/  I follow some amazing teachers and try to gather as many great resources for you as I can!  Stay tuned for more blog posts coming soon!

Have a great weekend and Spring Break week (for some of you)!

Literacy Lesson: Cerdota Grandota

If you find yourself teaching opposites, descriptive adjectives, or rhyming these days, you will definitely want to check out this cute book by Clare Beaton.

This book has fun repetitive and rhythmic text that is filled with teaching opportunities for all of the above.

Algunas vacas son flacas; otras son obesas.

¿Pero cuán grande es una cerdita?  ¿Lo sabes con certeza?

Algunos gansos están sucios; otros están limpiecitos. 

¿Pero cuán grande es una cerdita?  Cuenta los animalitos.

If you are teaching opposites, you can have your students match the opposite words.  

If you are teaching adjectives, you could invite your students to create Bridge Maps that apply the descriptive adjectives in the book to other objects.

If you are teaching rhyming, try doing a rhyming cloze reading where students predict the last word on the page during the read-aloud.  It is a great practice for predicting on the micro-reading level!

So, those were my ideas for using this book.  What ideas do you have?

Talking Rhyme with Dallas ISD

Today, thanks to the Warren Instructional Network, I had the privilege of spending the afternoon with a room full of PK-2 bilingual teachers from Dallas ISD.  As a Dallas resident, I loved getting to meet these teachers and see their passion for improving education for their students.  Our room got a little too full so I promised those that were turned away that I would post some of the resources shared here.

We kicked off our discussion on rhyming by first looking at some quotes from the Introduction to the Spanish Language Arts and Reading TEKS.  Can I just say that these make me so proud to be a Texan?  If you don't believe that these are actually written in our educational law, you can read them yourself right here!

In the interest of vertical team building, check out the importance of rhyming in these SLAR TEKS for grades 3-5 below.  Upper grade teachers, I know you appreciate primary grade teachers that help students develop their ability to distinguish rhyming words AND generate rhymes.  Those abilities will definitely be necessary for analyzing and writing poems!

Check out this Online Spanish Rhyming Dictionary for an excellent resource for creating lists of rhyming words for games and activities.

 Here is a list of some rhyming storybooks for anchoring students' understanding of rhyming:







These are wonderful books full of Spanish poetry for helping students appreciate rhythm and rhyme:







We played two HIGHLY competitive rounds of ¡Basta con las sílabas! where teachers had one minute to generate rhyming words with the endings listed on the game board.  When the timer sounded, participants shared their words with their group.  Every person that had a unique word received a point for his/her word.  If someone else in the group had the same word, neither person received a point.  I loved listening in to the conversations about different words!  This is such a fun, authentic activity for promoting rhyming and vocabulary development!  You can download my game board here for free!

I have previously blogged about the other games and activities that were shared today.  You can view all of ITDL's rhyming posts at this link: http://www.iteachduallanguage.blogspot.com/search/label/rhyming

Thanks again to the DISD teachers for a wonderful afternoon!  Please let me know if there is anything else that I promised you that I have forgotten here.

Stay tuned for a giveaway of a set of five Spanish poetry books from Warren Instructional Network and Booksource.  Details will be posted tomorrow morning!

De nada, empanada: Spanish Rhyming Phrases

Making rhymes and playing with words is one of the most reliable indicators that children are getting control of language.  They are becoming aware of words and sounds and can manipulate these to express themselves -- and impress others!  --Patricia Cunningham, Phonics They Use (1995)

I live with a two-year-old and a four-year-old and phrases like "Silly Billy" and "Okie dokie, Artichokie!" are spoken almost hourly.  Why?  Because they're so much fun to say!  AND because, like magic, my girls pay more attention to me when I rhyme!

Rhymers will be Readers: Books for Teaching Rhyming in Context

Okay, I know you have been hearing a lot about rhyming from me and I promise this will be the last post (at least for awhile!).  I just finished reading the book Reading Magic: Why Reading Aloud to our Children will Change Their Lives Forever.    It was SOOOO good!  Seriously, it summed up practically everything I learned in all my hours of Masters classes to get my M.Ed. in Reading.  It is an easy read and it will make you want to grab your kids or borrow someone else's and go read lots and lots of books together.  If you are a teacher or a parent, it is an essential read!

As I was reading, Mem Fox began to speak about, you guessed it, RHYMING!  :)  She says:
From songs, children learn words, sentences, rhythm, rhyme, and repetition, all of which they'll find later in the books they read.  Kids who can't recognize the fact that two words such as bed and Fred rhyme -- and there are many such kids -- have a hard time learning to read, whereas those who can rhyme are able to make more inspired and more correct guesses about what a particular word might be when they are reading. 
For example, in "Mary Had a Little Lamb," a child familiar with the rhyme would have no difficulty in reading the last word go because it so obviously rhymes with snow:  
Mary had a little lamb
Its fleece was white as snow
And everywhere that Mary went,
The lamb was sure to go.
Rhymers will be readers:  it's that simple.  Experts in literacy and child development have discovered that if children know eight nursery rhymes by heart by the time they're four years old, they're usually among the best readers by the time they're eight.  


So, now do you understand why I have been on a rhyming kick?  I have listed below some fun books available in Spanish with lots rhyme.  This is a short list so please leave your suggestions below in the comments!












As Mem Fox says later in the book "Beginning readers also need to know that the language in sentences usually makes sense."  Good rhyming books add to students' ability to make sense of that they are reading and predict at the micro-level the word or words that are to come next.  I love to play "Guess the Covered Word" using sticky notes in books.  Using Doreen Cronin's book above, I covered the word colchón to see if students could use both meaning and structure to correctly guess the word.  










As you play the rhyming games like those here, here, and here, it is important to always bring that skill back into the context of real text.  What are your favorite books for sharing the love of rhythm and rhyme with your students?

Nonsense Words & Rhyming: ¿Tiene sentido usar palabras SIN sentido?

When I hear the word "nonsense" in English, my first thought is silliness.  I live with a two-year-old and four-year-old so a high percentage of my daily vocabulary is composed of nonsense words.  I just looked up the Spanish definition for "nonsense" and the given synonyms are tonterías and estupideces.  Is it just me or do those words convey a completely different (way more negative) meaning?

There are lots of opinions about whether nonsense words should be used for assessing literacy.  While I can see the reason to not use them for assessment, I don't think they should be off limits for word play.  I found this activity on Pinterest when looking for rhyming activities and was super excited to discover that There's a Wocket in My Pocket is also available in Spanish with the title ¡Hay un molillo en mi bolsillo!

This is the perfect book for introducing the concept of nonsense words to your students.  Like I mentioned in a previous post about rhyming in Spanish, the research says that nonsense words may be used as long as students understand their purpose.  This was good news to me because, if you have ever tried to rhyme in Spanish, you know that you can quickly run out of options!  However, when you manipulate a syllable or two (another important PA skill!), you can create a infinite number of fun rhyming words.

In case you haven't read the Spanish or English version of this Dr. Seuss book, there is a little boy that walks through his house spying silly nonsensical creatures hanging about (la RESA sobre la MESA, ese ÑOFÁ en el SOFÁ, un NEGADERO flotando en el FREGADERO, etc.).  I typed up the rhyming pairs and attached a few to the pockets on the chart above.  Students can read and match the rhyming words that go with the words on the pockets.  Simple and fun!

And a little bonus to familiarizing your students (especially English language learners) with the notion of nonsense words:  In the upper grades, math and science assessments often use nonsense words to describe sets of examples and nonexamples.  A fourth grade bilingual teacher at my training last week thought she might use this book to help her students understand why these tests use crazy words to describe these sets!  I love the opportunity to be with such smart teachers! :)

¡Hasta mañana, Iguana! Rhyming Game

Are you looking for a super simple game to help your little ones practice generating rhymes?  This game is a perfect way for students to recall and play with the rhyming words that you have already exposed them to.  I first saw the idea for a rhyming dice game over at http://prekinders.com/rhyme/ and then added a gameboard for a little more friendly competition!

 

I bought a set of 3 of the dice/cubes above at Mardel's for $19.99.  I printed off six photos of words that would be simple for rhyming (fresa, pavo, luna, globo, gato, queso).  I slipped the pictures into the cubes, grabbed one of my Dollar Tree dice and a few counters, and printed out the gameboard below. 

To play the game, the student rolls the rhyming cube and generates a word that rhymes with the picture.  If they roll globo, they could say lobo, robo, bobo, etc.  After saying the rhyming word on the die and their own word, they roll the number die and move forward that number of spaces.  The first one to move their counter to the iguana wins!

What do you think?  Want to try it?  Download the picture cards and gameboard here!

Rima, Rima, Rimador...

Rhyming...if you are a PK/K teacher, that very word could strike terror in your soul!  You have probably been working on rhyming all year and now you are administering assessments on your little ones to see if they can generate rhyming words and identify rhyming pairs. 

I am currently preparing a training for a group of PK/K bilingual teachers on how to teach rhyming in Spanish.  EL Saber has a new resource available for teachers called Palabrimas.  The resource is a series of Spanish rhyming activities that give students the opportunity to practice their rhyming skills to become successful readers. 

While I have always known that rhyming was an important skill for literacy, I really didn't know why.  I could see the need for blending syllables...this helps you read words.  I could see the need for segmenting syllables...this helps you write words.  But rhyming?  Besides being fun, why is it considered so foundational, especially for Spanish-speakers and readers who do not rely on word families for decoding?

Well, after spending several hours searching the research journal databases, I found some really good articles and came up with these general recommendations from their studies on Spanish-speaking bilingual learners and rhyming instruction:

·      Developing the skill of rhyming in both languages simultaneously can help students acquire phonological awareness more quickly due to cross-linguistic transfer.

Dickinson, D., McCabe, A., Clark-Chiarelli, N., & Wolf, A. (2004).

·    Spanish-speaking children may require more exposure than their English-speaking peers to acquire rhyming skills.

Culatta, B., Reese, M., & Setzer, L.  (2006). 

·      Be careful when using visual images because of ELLs’ tendency to emphasize meaning over sound.

Moreira, S. & Hamilton, M.  (2006).

·      Target one rhyme per activity (initially) and provide multiple examples of the targeted rhyming words.  Nonsense words may be included but students must understand their purpose.

Culatta, B., Reese, M., & Setzer, L.  (2006). 

·      While teaching rhyme in Spanish is constrained by the limited number of rhyming word pairs available, teachers may compensate by repeatedly using the same word pairs in a large array of meaningful activities.

Culatta, B., Reese, M., & Setzer, L.  (2006). 

·      Anchor students’ understanding of the words rhyme/rima and rhyming words/palabras que riman.  Prior to reading subsequent stories, check for an understanding of what rhyming is and remind the children to listen for words that rhyme.

Adams, M., Foorman, B., Lundberg, I., & Beeler, T. (1998). 

·      Highlight the ending using intonation and stress.  While reading rhyme stories aloud, exaggerate the meter and rhyme to encourage active listening and anticipation among the children.

Culatta, B., Reese, M., & Setzer, L.  (2006). 

In addition to all of these Palabrimas resources, I have found and created a lot of other rhyming activities/games as well as located A LOT of Spanish rhyming books.  I will post more next week!  Until then...¡Hasta mañana, iguana!