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Fun Facts About English #59 – Words of Spanish Origin

06/26/2020 by admin

Fun Facts About English 59 Kinney Brothers Publishing

All of the highlighted words in the story below came into the English language via Spanish.

The English language is an amazing amalgamation of many European and other languages. Check out these posts about the linguistic influence of Native American languages, French, and classical languages like Greek and Latin!

See the previous or next Fun Facts About English

A good set of flashcards is worth its weight in gold! Check out all the vocabulary-building flashcard sets in Donald’s English Classroom!

Fun Facts About English #53 – Peas

05/15/2020 by admin

Fun Facts About English 53 Kinney Brothers Publishing

Teaching plurals was a regular part of my ESL classes in Japan. English language learners have to memorize singular and plural forms and how to properly use them, such as “I got my hair cut” and not “I got my hairs cut,” or “I went to a shoe shop” as opposed to a “shoes shop.”

No less than the myriad rules for making nouns plural, we also have to contend with spelling variants, irregular nouns, word imports, counters, and archaic forms — issues that drive even native English speakers mad! In a past Fun Facts About English post I gave examples of often mistaken and just plain confusing plurals. In this post, I’d like to focus on one particular case: peas.

When in elementary school, my siblings and I regularly came home for lunch. One day, to our surprise, Dad was home and, double surprise, had fixed us all lunch! He served up grilled cheese sandwiches (yea!) and a green soup he called “pea soup.” A hue and cry went up among us and we demanded he tell us what kind of soup it really was. Of course, none of us were going to be fooled into believing “pee soup” was a real thing! Dad just kept laughing at us. Finally, he brought out the empty Campbell’s Soup can and showed us Pea Soup written on the can. We all breathed a sigh of relief… sort of. We still thought it was super weirdo soup. Dad sure had a good time feeding the kids that day and a clear example of the rule for attributive nouns was fixed in my memory.

Some may remember a childhood rhyme called Pease Porridge Hot:

Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold,
Pease porridge in the pot, nine days old;
Some like it hot, some like it cold,
Some like it in the pot, nine days old.

If pease porridge is made with peas, why isn’t it called “pea” porridge? We don’t say ‘beans soup’ or ‘carrots juice.’ Is it just a British thing? Are pea dishes avoided in polite company because of the homonym? This is the kind of issue that would throw a wrench in my English lessons!

Here’s the answer:

Peasen is the archaic word for that member of the legume family we know today as peas. Peasen is plural and the singular is pease. Because pease ends with a /z/ sound and the seeds of the plant appear countable, pease was often mistaken for and reinterpreted as the plural form. Over time, this lead to the back-formation of a new singular: pea.

So, pease porridge, or pease pudding, as it’s sometimes called, maintains the archaic but correct singular spelling and pronunciation for a dish that is still enjoyed in England today. Here in the U.S., I’ve eschewed my finicky ways and embrace just about any kind of soup, even one made with peas.

If you enjoyed this post, you might be interested in reading about the lingual conga line of stacked adjectives, what happens when words rebracket over time, or the headache of writing headlines for newspapers!

See the previous or next Fun Facts About English

When building students’ English vocabulary, I Have/Who Has activities are great for reading, speaking, and listening! Check out my post A Game With Legs to see how versatile this simple game is!

Using Maps in Class

12/11/2019 by admin

When I began learning Japanese in the early 80s, it was imperative that I learn how to ask for directions from the get-go – especially in Tokyo. Not only did I have to deal with my lacking sense of direction, I was also functionally illiterate as I didn’t know any Japanese when I first arrived. A guide book and a paper train map were always in my bag. I also remember the huge city map on the kitchen wall in the foreigner’s house where I lived; an invaluable reference for fresh-off-the-boat travelers like me. To whatever train station I might be going, I regularly stopped at the local police box to ask directions – even if I already knew where I was going. Why? It was excellent language practice and I milked it.

Looking back, I was lucky. I was in the real world, immersed in a new language, and learning daily. Because we teach in a box, we have to find inventive ways to bring meaningful, real-world language into the classroom. Maps offer a visual opportunity for building language skills.

In my own book publications, I created maps and activities that are included in the Phonics & Spelling series, Q&A worksheets, and referenced for nearly every story in the Stories For Young Readers textbooks. I wanted my kids to know where they are in the world, learn about someplace new, and not be afraid to ask for directions or offer help to someone in need.

Stories For Young Readers Lesson Packs Kinney Brothers Publishing

Consider all the language used when dealing with maps:

geographical vocabulary – rivers, lakes, mountains
community places, cities, capitals, countries
prepositions of place – in, on, in front of, behind
directionals – north, south, right, left, forward, back, around
ordinal numbers
grammar tenses – past, present, and future
map vocabulary – legends, icons, scales

Donald's English Classroom Community Places

Starting early…

As my kids get older and catch on to the fact that I don’t really swim from the U.S. to Japan every day, we start learning community places, easy country names, and playing games with flags. Flags are already familiar to many sports-minded kids and there’s no reason to be ignorant about your favorite team’s home turf. In preparation for the Jidou Eiken tests, community place names and geographic vocabulary are a regular part of my flashcard activities. Keep in mind, these kinds of exercises can be just as informative and entertaining in your adult ESL classes!

When students begin moving about in their community and become aware that some people come from other places, like me, we start working with maps. Map activities pull together a variety of language skills — language you’ve probably been teaching your kids since they were little! It begins with prepositions of place and sight words like at, in, on, next to, and in front of. Interrogatives like where, what, and how come early on when asking the most rudimentary questions.

Once students develop informational reading skills, we look at town maps and tackle exercises in asking for and giving directions. We start with simple commands like Turn right! Turn left! and Go straight! Similar to community flashcard exercises in the past, students express where they are or want to go on the maps, e.g., I want to go to the station, or I’m at the library. Especially with large classes, big wall maps are essential for leading students through these types of activities.

Map making…

I went out in search of maps for my classroom many times and in many places around Tokyo. I could never find what I was looking for! Available maps were the wrong language, too expensive, too complicated, too big, too small, and so on. Yes, I’m picky, and I’m not going to have something in my classroom simply for decoration. What I wanted were easy-to-read and colorful wall maps appropriate for upper-elementary ESL kids in English. Simple to find, right? Nope.

So, I started creating my own. Because I don’t have a poster-size printer, I resized digital images and created wall maps out of regular sheets of paper. The students and I glued them together as a class activity, and viola! I have wall maps of each continent, a town map for practicing directions, and a U.S. map so I can talk about where I came from. Each map is dedicated to the class that helped put it together with a picture of the students and the date.

Doald's English Classroom Map Instructions

I also wanted the maps to be an interactive resource in my lesson plans. So, along with the wall maps, I created charts, worksheets, plus blank and numbered maps for classroom activities and handouts for students’ interactive notebooks. These are items not normally sold with maps you buy at a bookstore. Importantly, all the student materials are congruent with the wall maps and I’m not hobbling together different resources to create a series of lessons.

I’m pleased to say, these maps are now available in my online store. Click on the images to learn more. I hope you find these maps useful in your own classes.

Map Worksheets Kinney Brothers Publishing

Playing with maps…

Here are some map activities I’ve found particularly useful in class. If you have some activities you especially enjoy, help a teacher out and let us know in the comments below!

Create your own town! With a blank town map and a list of community places, allow students to create their own towns! Then have students ask and give directions based on their created maps. Let students visit each other’s town or vote on their favorite town!
Give students a numbered or blank map. Beginning with a labeled place, like a station, dictate directions and have students label the place of arrival on their own maps. This works well as an assessment of lessons taught.
Ask students to imagine a country they’d like to travel to for vacation. Create an outline of topics you would like them to research: weather, geography, food, history, etc. This is great grammar practice for future conditionals. With the online tools available for research, the possibilities are endless!

Historical maps Kinney Brothers Publishing

For practice with past tense, display a historical map next to a current map. This activity gets your students really scanning a map closely to discover the differences.
Teachers who teach from their home country are more likely to have students from a variety of places. A map can be a wonderful springboard for enjoyable and informative language practice. Pin the countries where students are from or have traveled to on a world map. Students love to talk about what they know best: their home country and all its unique cultural differences!

Finally, if you’re teaching about the United States and want your students to know their state names, capitals, and regions, check out my post on U.S.A. Maps and download a free map puzzle!

I hope this post encourages you to consider using maps more often in your ESL lessons. I’ll finish with a favorite quote:

I was completely drawn to other lands. I discovered with time that it’s a thirst for other people, for otherness, for something fascinating and mysterious. Robert Lepage

As always, best of luck in your classes!
Donald Kinney

U.S.A. Map Puzzles

01/16/2019 by admin

Donald's English Classroom Kinney Brothers Publishing Map Puzzles

These U.S. Map Puzzles on Powerpoint and Google Slides will help your kids learn the names, abbreviations, shapes, regions, and capitals of the United States. Whether you teach social studies, ESL, geography, or history, you’ll be sure to use these materials for years to come! Be sure to check out the free map puzzle at the end of this post!

Included in this download are 6 Powerpoint files and links to Google Slides files. Each slide deck includes 25 slides – 11 master map puzzles and 14 student map puzzles. Differentiated to reach a wide range of student abilities, you can use these maps in class for beginners just learning about the United States, to upper-grade students learning state capitals and U.S. history.

This file is also compatible to Regional Maps worksheets and is included in the Regional Maps Worksheets Bundle!

Check out a sampling of the 150 slides this resource has to offer! To get you started, download a full USA Map Puzzle on Powerpoint. It’s free!

Download this USA Map Puzzle on Powerpoint for free! Enjoy!

You may also be interested in these continent map puzzles!

Click here to see the complete lineup on Google Slides and PowerPoint!

Sight Words: What, When, and How

03/28/2018 by admin

What are Sight Words?

Whether you call them sight words, popcorn words, or high-frequency words, they are, by definition, “commonly used words that young children are encouraged to memorize as a whole or by ‘sight,’ so that they can automatically recognize these words in print without having to use any strategies to decode.” ^[1]

The Reading Teacher’s Book of Lists claims that the first 25 most frequent words make up about one-third of all printed material in English, and that the first 100 make up about one-half of all written material. Let that thought sink in. 50%! The obvious advantage of learning sight words is that it can have a powerful impact on a student’s reading fluency.

‘Sight Word’ is a bit of a misnomer because it implies that a word is learned simply by seeing it in its complete form. For this reason, flashcards are the most common way teachers will try to ‘drill’ the recognition of given words simply by repetition. If students are developmentally not ready in their spoken or orthographic skills, no matter how hard you may try, the words will not stick in their brains.

One problem with sight words is that many, though not all, lack dependable letter–sound correspondences (of = /uv/ and is = /iz/). Most words are more regular than not, especially in the consonant features. For example, the high-frequency word said is 50 percent regular; what would otherwise be a dependable ai digraph is irregular compared to the pronunciation of words like tail or paint. Nonetheless, it’s important teachers address these irregularities with students rather than avoiding them or assuming that students will eventually ‘pick up’ the differences.

In addition, high frequency words can be abstract, difficult if not impossible to represent using pictures, and especially difficult to understand where meaning may have an inferred understanding through context (something a second language learner doesn’t have the advantage of in early language development.) It can be very elusive to create a clear mental model of words like have and get, both of which can cross several different word choices in a language learner’s native language. Just as complicated is a word like was which refers to a past existential state of being. I remember trying to explain to students that “I win a prize” infers that if I win a game, I will get a prize, whereas, in Japanese, it is akin to saying “I prized a game.”

This is why students of English need to be exposed to the patterns of speech and inferred meaning of sight words early on in oral exercises, chants, and songs. Inevitably, as you move children from decoding individual words to decoding language in connected text, sight words should be a regular part of your ESL program.

Two popular sight word lists you might want to check out are Dolch’s Sight Words (by frequency) and Fry’s Sight Words (by grade level). Both of these lists are offered for free on sightwords.com.

When to Teach Sight Words

If you are teaching ESL students with the eventual goal of reading (and you should be), you need to begin thinking about sight words long before students encounter them in writing exercises. Building a vocabulary base that includes high frequency words that is not exclusive to nouns and verbs, contributes to a sense of word and meaning in context. Vocal chants and early Q&A exercises should include sight words in anticipation that these words will be encountered again in written text. Reading story books in class is also important for showing children how you read in English and, where possible, should include picture prompts and word cues so children can participate in the reading of the story.

Whether you’re teaching very young ESL students in class, or a parent trying to prepare your child for a future of reading, many of the approaches to introducing reading and books are the same. Check out this list of recommended activities for parents from SmartParentAdvice and consider how they may be applied in the classroom.

Before teaching children sight words orthographically, it is necessary that children have a solid foundation of the ABCs, phonemes and understand concepts of word. From there, learning sentence structure and decoding meaning in context should be taught in that order.

In other words, you can’t teach kids the concept of word without first teaching the ABCs. Trying to use flash cards to teach sight words, like visual designs, out of context and with no relationship to connected meaning, will NOT make the words stick nor will they transfer to automatic written understanding. Likewise, expecting a child to write and rewrite a sentence when they can’t yet decode the individual words is not going to eventually impart meaning.

When students understand the ABCs and their associated sounds, can combine those sounds into a concept of word, and are capable of understanding sentence constructs, THAT is the time to begin teaching and exercising sight words. The good news is that many children learn these concepts in their own language at a very young age and have the ability to transfer that understanding to a new language and a new set of rules.

How to Teach Sight Words

There are many ways to strengthen your students’ knowledge and recognition of sight words in text and out of text.

How do you begin to teach sight words? Again, start early by reading to your classes, and importantly, showing kids how you are reading. By simply pointing to each word as you read, you’re teaching them much more than just the words associated to colorful illustrations. You’re also teaching them about print concepts, moving from left to right, top to bottom, and the return sweep. All of these concepts can operate very differently in a child’s native written language.

Anticipating future exercises by building a targeted vocabulary and sentence pattern base is helpful when it comes time to introduce students to orthographic exercises. You will rely on that knowledge base to help them transition to written text and a speech-to-print match.

Keep in mind that eventually you’re going to be taking students beyond decoding words and into the realm of decoding sentences. The reading goals you set for your students should begin long before they start reading and writing.

If you have been teaching phonics and simple CVC words and your kids are ready to start using those words in easy sentences, you’re ready to begin teaching easy sight words. Along with your regular phonics exercises, start throwing sight words into the mix! If you want more ideas for working with flash cards, check out my 50+ Flash Card Activities post.

Writing Phrases and Patterning Mentor Texts

Children can write phrases that include high frequency words that build off patterned mentor (sample) texts. With ESL students, offering prompts and spelling can help children build sentences and understand the importance of the sight words in their placement amongst already learned words from their phonics lessons.

Matching

Using flash cards, line up a sentence and have students read the sentence until they are familiar with the order and meaning. Then cover up the sight words or pull them out and have students replace or match the words of the original sentence. This same activity works well as a worksheet with cutting and pasting to replace the missing words.

Matching is also an excellent way to reinforce learned words in out-of-text activities. The pages below, including Bingo, when reduced to their most basic skill, are simply matching activities. But, don’t tell the kids this! They think they’re playing a game or doing a puzzle! When you combine sight word matching with writing, coloring, counting, spinners, dice, random choice, and memory skills, you have activities that will engage and entertain students on a variety of levels.

Highlighting

In this example of an in-text exercise, students use a marker to highlight sight words. Like the sample at the beginning of this post, you can hand out highlighters, choose any random text, and have students highlight the words being learned. This is also a great cool down exercise for the whole class or activity for early finishers!

Pick Up

Pick Up is a super simple activity that keeps students engaged. Ask students to pick up all the words that begin with a particular consonant, vowel, or capital letter. Or have students listen to a spoken sentence and line up the words in order. Sentence Fishing is simply a pick-up type game and kids can’t get enough of it! Remember, when errors are made, it’s a rich opportunity to lead children to helpful conversations so they can articulate why a word doesn’t fit.

Sorting

Another out-of-text activity for developing sight words is sorting. Have children sort their word cards based on letters, sounds, or key words. Guide students in reflecting on what’s the same and what’s different. Grouping words with their beginning letters and then putting them in alphabetical order is another sorting plus ordering activity that will serve future dictionary work! Remember, always think ahead!

Flash Cards

Making sentences is a great way to get kids to review and use learned words to make more orthographic connections. Here, using flashcards not as a means to drill, but a way of exploring new connections gives students a creative way to build on lessons learned. Challenge your kids to see who can make the most surprising sentences!

Word Games

Word games are a fun way to reinforce sight words and can include I Have/Who Has activities, word search and crossword puzzles, and many board game type games. Introducing and playing these kinds of games in class is important. Students may be playing these kinds of games in their own language, but the only opportunity to do so in English may be in your classroom.

Sight words promote confidence. Because the first 100 sight words represent over 50% of English text, a child who has mastered the list of sight words can already recognize at least part of a sentence. Sight words provide clues to the context and promote reading comprehension.

As you move from ABCs through emergent reader activities, you’ll want to have reading goals in place. As a teacher, it is important to be able to recognize when a student has a command of the sounds of the alphabet, achieves the concept of word, is displaying rudimentary reading ability, and finally, capable of decoding and deriving meaning from connected text. These concepts must be developed in this order to achieve reading fluency. You won’t get there without teaching sight words. The habits that you build into the children’s learning activities will help them to acquire new words more quickly, build on their knowledge base to infer meaning, and progress more confidently in their studies.

If you are interested in more of the same kinds of exercises illustrated in this post, check out my Easy Sight Words worksheets for ESL students. If there are activities that you use in class that are not listed here, help a teacher out and leave a comment!

As always, best of luck in your classes!

Donald Kinney

Kinney Brothers Publishing

[1] Ravitch, Diane. (2007). EdSpeak : A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development, ISBN 1416605754.

Free Digital Files for Distance Learning

10/16/2017 by admin

Free and Ready!

Not sure how to get started in Google Classroom? Here are four free files you can download now and try out in your new virtual classroom! Play games, work with flash cards, or assign work from our digital textbooks!

Click on these links to learn more about Google Classroom, watch an introductory video or read this FAQ. Anyone with a gmail account can sign up for free!

Donald’s English Classroom has lots of digital files to get you started! Check out our popular Bingo Games and Flash Cards. We also have the complete Stories For Young Readers series, Book 1 and Book 2 available. Download individually or get the discounted Bundles.

Download the files below for free! Be sure to comment and let us know how you used these files in class!