Kindergarten: Our Bodies

For the past 6 weeks, kindergarteners have been learning the names of our body parts in Spanish.  We have had fun singing Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes in Spanish - ask your child to sing this for you! We have also learned a new Spanish song about making music with our bodies - "Mi Cuerpo Hace Música!"

Check out the vocabulary below and see how many your child can name for you if you point to that body part! 

Head = cabeza (cah-BEH-zah)

Shoulders = hombros (OM-bros)

Knees = rodillas (row-DEE-yahs)

Feet = pies (PEE-es)

Eyes = ojos (OH-hose)

Ears = orejas (oh-DEH-has)

Mouth = boca (BOH-kah)

Nose = nariz (nah-DEES)

To go along with our study of body parts, we have played a lot with monsters!  We read the book "Go Away, Big Green Monster" in Spanish - the students loved it!  Then we also explored several other monsters and made observations in Spanish about how many of each body part they had.  We even created our own class monster in Spanish!  To finish up our mini unit, today students drew themselves as "monsters" and were able to describe their body parts in Spanish - check out your students' work in their take-home folder! 

Kindergarten: Las Hojas

We have continued our autumn theme by looking at the árboles (trees) and changing hojas (leaves) around us. To describe these, we have been continuing to practice our words for sizes and have been adding words for fall colors. The colors shown below correspond to a song we learned about the falling leaves:

 rojo

amarillo

 marrón

 anaranjado

Students should be comfortable singing the slow part in the beginning and at the end (this part uses their color words and some hand motions about falling leaves). The faster part in the middle is about raking leaves into a big mountain to jump in. Kindergarteners have enjoyed choosing leaves, naming their colors, and decorating our class tree together!

Kindergarten - Las Calabazas

To celebrate el otoño (autumn), we have been spending our time in Spanish class describing many different kind of calabazas (pumpkins). To do this, kindergarteners have been hard at work learning many adjectives, including the words for sizes and colors. Below are some photos of pumpkins (some we already looked at in class; others are new). See if your child can use a Spanish word or two to describe the pumpkins they see. Numbers count as adjectives, so you can also ask ¿Cuántas calabazas hay? and let them count them up.

We also talked about how pumpkins are feeling...with jack o'lanterns! Today we completed a small art project in which each student designed a calabaza especial and described how it is feeling. Ask your child to see it, and to describe the pumpkins feelings aloud. Feeling words can be found here for a refresher.

Grade 3: El Alfabeto Español

In the next several class meetings we will be studying the Spanish alphabet. Third graders will learn to pronounce the letters of the alphabet--both their names and the sounds they make. They will also discover that the Spanish alphabet has more letters than the English alphabet! If you are curious about this, ask them to tell you about the four "extra" letters they learn about this week. (For extra practice that is also fun, check out this mini-game to hear the names of the letters in Spanish and see them in action spelling the words for common animals (a bonus review!). Another resource for both pronunciation practice and game play is here.

We will continue working on Spanish spelling this week and next. This practice will include sounding out words in Spanish (and finding the corresponding letter according to Spanish phonetics), spelling aloud, taking dictation when someone else is spelling, and playing hombre muerto (hangman). Knowing the alphabet and being able to "spell by ear" in Spanish is a skill that we will continue to practice all year, and one that will be invaluable as students progress in the language.

Grade 3: Las Escuelas de México

Today we finished a discussion about what a typical school in Mexico is like for students there. We discussed many similarities and differences, including subjects studied, scheduling, class sizes, and where meals are eaten during the school day. For enrichment on this topic, there is a great website here that describes a day in the life of a young student in Mexico in her own words. I have linked the Spanish slideshow, but there is a button at the top to click for translation to English. Students won't recognize all the words, but a great challenge activity is to read the caption in Spanish first, picking out the recognizable words and making a guess about the overall meaning of the photo. After giving it some thought, a click on the English should clear up any lingering confusion. There are about a dozen photos and captions in the slideshow overall. Check it out!