La Pared de Palabras/The Spanish Word Wall

La Pared de Palabras-¿Cómo debería ser diferente?

 

According to Karen Beeman and Cheryl Urow in their book Teaching for Biliteracy, Spanish word walls should not look like word walls in English as each language works differently.  They should build on the walls used in the grade before.  The book has a chart with examples of what the walls should look like at each grade level from K-5.  This is a great book, by the way, for Dual Language divas and bilingual teachers in general!!

 

    

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1934000094/?tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=44033035116&hvpos=1t1&hvexid=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=381366324145424111&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=e&hvdev=c&ref=pd_sl_3ykvm5m6no_e 

 

In kindergarten the focus should be on how syllables join to make words and should contain student generated words. Articles should be included with the words and there should be a focus on "letras tramposas," i.e. /b/ and /v/, /s/, /z/ and /c/, /ll/ and /y/, etc.

 

We categorize words by their syllables in any position so some will end up repeated in different parts of the wall.  For example, mapa could be categorized under /ma/ and /pa/.  

 

We also have content area vocabulary and required high frequency words.  This year I would like to create a theme wall to have those words separate from the words the students generate and highlight the content vocabulary we are working on. 

 

There is also a cognados/cognates wall and a Math wall.  That's a lot of walls!! Luckily, I have lots of bulletin board space. 

 

I also plan to to give students their own personal word walls this year to use during writing.

 

My classroom is a big mess with all of the furniture piled on one side right now. I saw it this morning when I stopped by to pick up something for a meeting.  When I get back to work in August I plan to post pics of the new set up to share here!

 

If you have questions, comments or pictures about Spanish word walls I would LOVE to hear them as this is a work in progress and I am always excited to learn new things from other teachers in the field!

 

¡Adelante al verano! 

 

 

La Pared de Palabras-The Saga Continues

 

This was last year's word wall: 2013-2014. It keeps evolving!  I moved into a new classroom with bigger boards (Yeay!)  In August it will change yet again (hopefully for the last time) so that there is no mistaking that it is different than my English Word Wall. I hope I am definitely moving more in that direction!

Vowels are on the left-Consonants on the right

The articles are in black, the words are divided into syllables in purple and green for each word. We switched from D'Nealian to Zaner Bloser this year but I did not love the way the text was hard to read from far away. I am working on adding bolder text for this year.

I made posters for the letters that have the same sounds or more than one sound (b/v, s/s/z, g/g, c/c, etc.). Those worked out well.



     The English word wall stayed the same (see photo below).  This Summer will be time for putting bigger fonts on the words and dividing the wall up even more by making cards and separate sections for each syllable instead of a card with the letter and the syllables below it, as pictured above for the letter "Pp." Students use Post-Its to copy the words or write them on their portable word walls whenever they need a word.

       I'm hoping to post pics of the new version of the wall as I set up the classroom in August.  Here, too, is a picture of our Cognates from 2013-2014.  In our classroom, blue stands for Spanish, red stands for English and Green has both languages.

What does your Spanish word wall look like? I would love to get more ideas. Happy Summer!!

La Pared de Palabras-In the Beginning

 

 

So today I'm contemplating word walls.  Our class has two of them: one in English and one in Spanish.  This is the first complete year that the Spanish wall is different and much larger than the English word wall.  I changed it halfway through last year so we'll see if it makes a difference starting at the beginning of the year (it used to look just like the English word wall...Eeeek!).  You can see the vowels at the top to help us focus on syllable identification.  I'll add and change the focus consonant as I introduce it.  The strong men next to a, e and o help identify the strong vowels. There is also an "h muda" (silent h) area and a space for categorizing articles. The words themselves will be displayed both divided into syllables and as whole words. You can see this concept in the bottom left corner of the picture with the word hilo.

The English word wall still focuses on initial sound identification but I'm going to display the words in both phonemes and whole words (i.e. c + a + t = cat) this year.