LITERACY

Dictionary Games

 * Put four Spanish words on the board in four different colours. Give each child four coloured cubes. Children have to find the words in a bilingual dictionary and then put the coloured cubes in the corresponding alphabetical order. Children can also find out what word class the words belong to e.g. verb, noun, adverb. Children can then report back to you the colour order in Spanish.
 * Put a Spanish word on the board. Ask the children to find the next adverb, verb, adjective etc. in the dictionary.

Borrowed words
One way of introducing Spanish words to children is to highlight words that are in constant use in English. Words such as banana, Rodeo, pronto, taco, enchilada all originate from Spanish. The following websites shows Spanish words used in English: http://www.krysstal.com/borrow_spanish.html http://spanish.about.com/cs/historyofspanish/a/spanishloanword.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Spanish_origin

Deal or No deal (Allá Tú!)
This game is loosely linked to the TV game show, 'Deal or No Deal'! It emphasises the following parts of literacy and language learning: –
 * Understand word class
 * Understand syntax (sentence construction)
 * Understand agreement

You need ten to twenty boxes and at least two simple sentences that contain an article, noun, adjective, verb and adverb. e.g. **el gato negro corre rapido**, or **la tortuga verde come lentamente**. Each individual word is placed in a different box. The children are split into two teams and take turns to choose a box. The first team to create a sentence that contains each word type and agrees, wins.