I have decided to finish a project I began with my students in Mexico. That project consists of taking the 500 Most Frequent Words used in the English language and finding their equivalent meaning in Spanish. We finished the first 10 Lists (250 words), and they are online now at http://timnew.com/esl . I am adding the other 10 lists today, but initially they will just be English. If you are a native Spanish speaker, I'd love your input! I will mostly be using VOX Spanish and English dictionaries and English and Spanish Verb books. That will get me close on most words, but I have learned that some words in the dictionary are not what is used on the streets. I am primarily looking for Spanish of Mexico since I am hoping my former students will use the list to continue learning English. But any comments are welcome. If the word has a different or unique regional meaning, please let me know.Once I have the project completed in Spanish, I may expand it for other languages.If you are learning Spanish this list can help you also!If you are not a native Spanish speaker but would still like to help - feel free. I was learning Spanish while teaching English, and a lot of the Spanish I learned was by doing lists like this.
I may put my flash card templates online also. I had forgotten about them.
All the lists are done in Excel. I printed each one on a page for my students that was color coded. I used 4 colors - pink, orange, green and yellow. I laminated the pages by placing the lists in pairs, back to back. So list 1 &2, 3&4, 5&6, 7&8, 9&10. I am sending Lists 9 and 10 back to my 4th grade students today as I promised them I'd do when I left.
MY students in Mexico (3rd and 4th grade) studied the lists, they made flash cards to study, we went over the words in class, I'd say the English words and have them write them, I'd say the Spanish word and have them give me the English and vice versa. Using flash cards, I had 4x6 color coded cards with English on one side and Spanish on the other. If I showed them the English they gave me the Spanish. If I showed the Spanish words, they gave me the English. After a while, the cards were shuffled - some would be Spanish and some English so they were constantly switching languages. If the word was one that could have an image associated with it, I'd sometimes have them draw a picture for the word. Such as the verb run, they could draw a picture of a person or animal running. That works better with nouns than verbs though.
If the word is also a verb, we went over the present, past, future and conditional tenses. We were starting to do the progressive tenses also just before I left. We also used the words in sentences to give context.
I'll see if I can put the Excel pages online to download. If so people can print each one on 8 1/2 by 11 paper or card stock of their choice.
Once I finish the lists, I hope to do individual pages on at least some words showing bilingual examples of their usage.
Comments
I may put my flash card templates online also. I had forgotten about them.
All the lists are done in Excel. I printed each one on a page for my students that was color coded. I used 4 colors - pink, orange, green and yellow. I laminated the pages by placing the lists in pairs, back to back. So list 1 &2, 3&4, 5&6, 7&8, 9&10. I am sending Lists 9 and 10 back to my 4th grade students today as I promised them I'd do when I left.
MY students in Mexico (3rd and 4th grade) studied the lists, they made flash cards to study, we went over the words in class, I'd say the English words and have them write them, I'd say the Spanish word and have them give me the English and vice versa. Using flash cards, I had 4x6 color coded cards with English on one side and Spanish on the other. If I showed them the English they gave me the Spanish. If I showed the Spanish words, they gave me the English. After a while, the cards were shuffled - some would be Spanish and some English so they were constantly switching languages. If the word was one that could have an image associated with it, I'd sometimes have them draw a picture for the word. Such as the verb run, they could draw a picture of a person or animal running. That works better with nouns than verbs though.
If the word is also a verb, we went over the present, past, future and conditional tenses. We were starting to do the progressive tenses also just before I left. We also used the words in sentences to give context.
I'll see if I can put the Excel pages online to download. If so people can print each one on 8 1/2 by 11 paper or card stock of their choice.
Once I finish the lists, I hope to do individual pages on at least some words showing bilingual examples of their usage.