Commonality Associations 1-45

1. Tree, pen
2. Light switch, bow tie, swan
3. Stool
4. Car
5. Glove
6. Gun
7. Dice
8. Roller skates, ice cream cone
9. Cat
10. Bowling ball, stone tablets
11. Goal post
12. Eggs
13. American Flag, witch, donut (baker's dozen)
14. Ring
15. Paycheck
16. Candy, a tarantula eating another spider (8+8)
17. Airplane, magazine
18. Voting booth, 18-wheeler
19. Golf club
20. Glasses
21. Cards
22. Tutu
23. White sheep
24. Watch
25. Quarter
26. Alphabet Soup
27. Euro
28. Saturn
29. Moon
30. Chocolate kiss
31. Pumpkin
32. Ice cube
33. Cross, prayer beads

World War II series 1934-1945

34. Toothbrush (Hilter come to power in Germany, toothbrush mustache man)
35. Blood wig (Hitler wanted to make everyone blonde in 1935)
36. Helicopter (flying guns, invented in Germany in 1936)
37. Great wall of China (Japan occupies China and play dice on the Great Wall)
38. Boots (Austria surrenders to Germany, and soldiers march in on their boots)
39. Tank (Hiter's fat cats invade Poland with tanks)
40. Pears (Hilter bowls over the French army and rolls into Paris)
41. Snowman (Hilter invades Russia, but the cold and snow defeat him)
42. Smoke stacks (Hitler orders the final solution to flip the switch on the ovens and to burn the Jews and other prisoners in the concentration camps)
43. Pentagon (The Pentagon is finished in 1943, and many office workers sit on stools)
44. Boats (The US send boats to unload military vehicles and troops onto Hilter's defenses)
45. Mushroom (The US drops the atom bomb on Japan raising a mushroom cloud.)
45. Mushroom

Letter Sent Home with Students Today

November 12^th, 2010

Dear Spanish Class Parents,

            Next week we our having our last four Spanish classes before ending with school wide presentations on Monday and Tuesday, the 22^nd and the 23^rd.  This weekend students who are behind have to decide whether the pass or fail the class; or, if they are doing well, whether they pass or achieve a grade of outstanding.  There are three conditions for passing the class:

1)      Students must be sufficiently on task—or at least not disruptive—during our four sessions a week.  Everyone has seen many of their grades in this respect already; and so far, everyone is passing in this regard.

2)      Students must, at minimum, complete individual illustrations for all of the alphabet icons, labeling them correctly with the gender and the alphabet letter on each drawing.  Most students are passing at this level, but some students are failing for one of two reasons—either the student hasn’t finished all of the letters yet, or the student is labeling the picture incorrectly, writing the letter “R” on a page with a picture of a sponge for example, instead of “S.”  You might want to check each page in your student’s workbook this weekend to make sure that all the letters of the alphabet are complete and that each letter matches the animal icon drawn.  A packet with outstanding examples of student work for each letter is included with this letter.  You can also see all of the examples in the packet on the class webpage at http://spanishforpoets.blogspot.com.

3)      Students must pass an oral spelling test covering all of the letters, genders, and animal icons next week.  On the test, students will be told only the name of the letter and the name of the animal.  They have to fill in the correct gender by memory.  This will be easy if they focus on only memorizing which animals are feminine as there are very few feminine animal icons on our list.  So, 1/3 of the test next week is spelling the letters correctly (a, be, ce, de, e, efe, ge, hache, etc.), 1/3 is labling the gender correctly (el, la, los, or las), and 1/3 is spelling the animal name correctly when it is heard.

In order to get a grade of “outstanding” rather than “passing,” students must also complete imaginative association pictures for each of the numbers 1 through 15, one page of notes or a picture for the numbers 16-19, and one picture for the number 20.  They must also pass a spelling test on the numbers 1-20.  Any mistakes in this area may be compensated for by advancing into the geography series.

This class established a basic introduction to Spanish phonetics for students who demonstrated that they lacked this knowledge on a pretest at the beginning of the year.  Unlike English (where speaking and spelling are two different things), speaking and spelling work together perfectly in Spanish.  Words are spelled exactly the way they sound.  That is why we lay a strong foundation in the alphabet in Spanish before advancing into lots of vocabulary, verbs, and conjugations.  Every verb in Spanish can be changed with one or two letters to mean over 120 things in Spanish.  With a strong foundation in the alphabet it is possible to master this later on; without it, it’s very challenging for non-native speakers.

Please sign and return this letter so that I know that you have received it.

Sincerely,                                                                     Signed:_________________________________

Señor Apache                                                  For Student:___________________________________

Alphabet Summary

Z sounds like C, as in "la cebra"

Be careful with the letter "Z" in Spanish.  It appears from time to time, but it is not a common letter at all.  You can't assume that just because a word in English has the letter Z in it that the same word in Spanish will too.  That's why we're learning la cebra as our warning icon for the letter Z, just like we had an animal starting with B as our warning icon for the letter V.  Thank you John for this picture.  Instead of giving this animal a necklace to remind us that it is feminine, John colored la cebra purple to let us know it's a girl.  Also, the fact that it ends in an "A" sound is a big clue too.

Y is for "el yac"

Like we said earlier, the K (and the W) are virtually nonexistent letters in Spanish, used pretty much only to spell Australian animals, so yak in Spanish is spelled "yac" with a "c" instead of a "k" because "k" is only for very foreign words in Spanish.  Thank you John for this picture.  You even captured the full pronunciation of the letter Y's name as igriega.  The only thing we are missing though is the necktie on the yac since he's a masculine animal.

X is for "el xilofono"

There are no (normal) animals starting with the letter X, so we'll turn to the all purpose xylophone for our icon.  The Spanish word for xylophone, as you might guess, is simply el xilofono.  "X" is another virtually non-existent letter in Spanish, like "K" and "W."  Whenever you see it, pronounce is as an "S" sound.  Most Spanish speakers don't use the "ks" sound.  Thank you Leeann for a great burst of creativity in giving us el xilofono man at the end of the alphabet.  He looks like the letter X the way his arms and legs spread out, and his head makes and "O" shape on the top reminding us to end this word in the "O" sound.  Great work! 

W is for "el wallaby"

A wallaby is like a smaller version of the kangaroo.  It is spelled the same in Spanish as it is in English; however, we must remember to pronounced the "LL" in the middle as a "Y" sound.  The "Y" at the end acts like the letter "I" in this word as a vowel.  The "Y" in Spanish works as a "sometimes" vowel making the "I" sound when there are no other vowels in the syllable.  This Wallaby is wearing a necktie to remind us that he is masculine in gender.