Clare Roach, M.Ed.
[email protected]
Reasons to be excited about (not afraid of) learning Spanish!
1. You don’t have to speak perfect Spanish to be understood.
2. It’s a great act of solidarity with your language learning students.
3. There are thousands of cognates, so you know a ton of Spanish already!
4. You can communicate messages with only a few simple expressions.
5. Everyone smiles in the same language.
Great Resources:
• Spanish for Educators by William C. Harvey, M.S. (Barron’s, 2006).
• McGraw-Hill’s Spanish for Educators by José M. Díaz and María F. Nadel (McGraw-Hill, 2006).
• Casa Notes: CasaNotes.4Teachers.Org generates note templates for field trip permissions, student
contracts, invitation to parent-teacher conferences, etc. Users are given the option of printing the
notes in Spanish or English.
• Colorin Colorado: ColorinColorado.Org is an incredibly useful website full of ESL resources for
teachers and families. There are numerous communication and parent education tools translated into
Spanish. Here are a few examples (click on the Spanish tab at the top of each article to see/print the
Spanish language version):
• Who’s Who at your Child’s School
• Parent-Teacher Conferences Explaines
• Reading Tip Sheets for Parents (differentiated by age)
• iVoice Translator Pro ($0.99) is an app that can act as a double-sided translation service, allowing
the other person to speak back to the app. Other apps share this capability, but iVoice has a more userfriendly interface for displaying these translated conversations.
• Word Lens is a free app that can snap a photo of written text, menus, and street signs in a foreign
language and translate them into the user's native language. Word Lens was recently acquired by
Google for a planned integration into the Google Translate service.
• Google Translate is a free, web-based translation service that provides instant translations between
dozens of different languages. It can translate words, sentences and web pages between any
combination of languages.
VOWELS
A = ‘ah’
E = ‘eh’
O= ‘oh’
I=‘ee’
U=‘oo’
Gue = ‘geh’
Gui = ‘gee’
(like school)
(ex. Guerilla)
(ex. CristinaAguilera)
Que= ‘keh’
Qui= ‘key’
(ex. Quesadilla)
)J
= ‘h’(like ‘ha!”)
(ex. Tequila)
CONSONANTS
Ň = ‘ny’ (like ‘canyon’)
(ex. Jalapeño)
H = ‘silent’
(ex. niño)
LL=‘y’ (like ‘yes’)
(ex. hola)
(ex. tortilla)
C & G are soft before e or i and hard before a or o.
(ex. Centavo, Gilberto, Capitán and Gato)
Quesadilla
Tortilla
Radio
Flan
Mucho
Loco
Nada
Pronto
Libro
Dinero
Supermercado
Bueno
Escuela
Estudiante
Problema
Profesor
Chocolate
Color
Final
Idea
Natural
Terror
Regular
Tequila
Martinez
Jalapeno
Gracias
Permiso
Oficina
Hermano
Hermana
Madre
Padre
Directora
Emergencia
Hospital
General
Gol