Friday, October 26, 2018

Teaching Spanish Number Vocabulary to Elementary Students

Last spring, a number of my tutoring students graduated.  I had been working with many of these students for 5 years or more and I was both proud and a little sad at their moving on to the next stage of their lives.

This also meant that I was able to accept new students to work with.  I have been so pleased with the variety of levels and ages that I am working with this fall.  I have a number of kindergarten and early elementary students at a very low level of Spanish.  Several of them are math oriented so we started our lessons by learning how to count in Spanish.

Here are five of my favorite activities:

1.  Sing, sing sing!  Unfortunately for me, many of my students do not love singing, but I still try to push it a bit as it's a great way to learn new vocabulary and gain confidence in speaking a new language.  Some of my favorite numbers songs are:


Un Elefante Se Balanceaba




Cingo Monitos




Cinco Pececitos Se Fueron a Nadar




2.  Roll-A-Die Drawing:

My students absolutely LOVE drawing crazy pictures so much they barely notice that they are learning!  There are several sites that I love that have great ideas:




Roll-a-Doodle, Roll-a-Face, Roll-a-Landscape
Roll-a-Picasso
Roll-a-Monster


3.  Dice Games:

I wrote a post outlining some of my favorite dice games that help teach larger numbers.

Recently, I found these Yatzy Scorecards online.  Yatzy is so much fun as kids love to roll dice (the more the better!) and this game practices both small numbers (reading the dice aloud) as well as larger numbers (adding the dice and later on the scores together).

Another fun dice game is Qwixx. Its scorecard has minimal verbiage so I do not translate it into Spanish for my students.


4.  Card Games:

Uno7 ate 9, and different card games like Cinquillo or Crazy Eights are a lot of fun to practice smaller numbers.  I especially love teaching kids how to play Cinquillo as they are blown away by the Spanish deck of cards (Why doesn't it contain 8s and 9s???) and the card designs are so much fun.

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