Hear It, See It, Say It, Wear It

When you were a baby, you learned the meaning of words in several ways: you heard the word "shoes" as your parents helped you get dressed.  You saw the shoes, your parents helped you put them on your feet.  Soon you were able to put concepts together: the brown shoes, the blue jacket, the green shirt.

Our process in Spanish has been similar.  Last semester, our third and fourth graders learned the colors and how to make nouns and adjectives plural.  This semester we have been learning the four definite articles and the rules of gender and number agreement, along with clothing vocabulary.

In our class that looks like a lot of hearing the words, seeing the words, saying the words and, in this case, wearing them.  We sing a song at the beginning of class with all of the clothing words, and sometimes another song to help us remember the colors.  We write charts of all the definite articles, and which endings for the Spanish words match each ones.

Today, I called out complete sentences in Spanish and the children drew pictures to illustrate them. If I said, "La blusa es morada," they would draw a purple blouse.  If I called out, "Los calcetines son amarillos," they would color a pair of yellow socks.  Although we haven't formally covered changing the endings of color words to match the noun for gender and number, several of them noticed that I was doing that and were able to figure out the reason why! (And by the way, these kids must rock at Pictionary, because they had the clothing drawn and colored before I could even repeat the sentence).

Of course, no unit on clothing is complete without some wild races to see who can put on the item of clothing first.  Do you have any idea how loud the giggles get when you have twenty students laughing their heads off?  It's a beautiful sound in any language.  :)