'Día' is the Spanish for 'day' - and it breaks one of the first rules a learner is taught. Words ending in '-a' are usually feminine, but it's 'el día', masculine.
There's a reason 'día' keeps a masculine gender it seems to have no right to, and it goes back a very long way. The cards follow that story, clear up why 'día' looks like the English 'day' without being related to it, and turn up a surprising distant cousin along the way.
• An illustrated black-and-white word-history in comic form - stage panels, one idea to each, following 'día' back to its Latin root, gender and all
• The word-history breakdown, Latin to modern Spanish, with a date at each stage the record allows
• A sources page listing where every claim comes from
• A short guide for the adult on how to use the cards
The PDF prints two ways, and you choose which suits you. The large cards - one idea to a page - are made to be laminated and clipped onto a single binder ring, so a child can handle them, turn them over and lay them out in order. You print, laminate, trim and bind these yourself; the cards are numbered, so a loose deck goes back in sequence. The single sheet at the end holds the whole word on one page - print it and it's ready, no laminating or cutting - for the pencil case or the middle of a lesson. You'll need a printer; a laminator and a ring are needed only for the deck.
Because the large cards come apart, there's more to do with them than read. Rebuild the timeline in order, and stop on the card that explains the gender. Put 'día' and the English 'day' next to each other and talk through why they look alike but aren't related. Hunt for the distant cousin the cards turn up. Hold up the English-cousin cards and sort them back to the root. If you own more than one word from El Taller Raíz, clip the shared cards onto one ring and put the day-words together. It's the same cards, talked through and handled differently - adult-led, a few minutes at a time, never a drill.
'Día' trips learners twice - it's masculine despite its '-a', and it looks like the English 'day' but isn't related to it. Both are the kind of exception that makes a learner distrust the rules they've just been taught. Rather than hide them, the cards explain them - each oddity has a reason a child can hold onto.
Made for secondary Spanish learners at Key Stages 3 and 4, but it suits a wider range:
• Anyone who likes where words come from
• Spanish learners in Key Stages 3 and 4, and GCSE students meeting 'día' and noun gender
• Home-educated children
• Learners who find vocabulary hard to hold when it's taught as isolated words - including dyslexic and working-memory profiles
• Parents brushing up their own Spanish, or studying alongside a child
• Adults coming back to Spanish after school
This isn't a first step into Spanish. A learner should already be meeting 'día' and 'el/la' gender in lessons - the cards explain a word, and an exception, a child is already running into. If a child hasn't started Spanish at all yet, this will come too early.
Related resources
• In El Taller Raíz: 'hoy' and 'buenos días' are the nearest neighbours - 'hoy' hides the same 'día' inside it, and 'buenos días' is 'día' made plural.
• For anyone who likes the links across languages: Italian 'oggi' and French 'aujourd'hui' carry the same Latin 'day' behind them; the 'jour' and 'giorno' words are the daylight branch of the family.
• In the Compendium: the post on why word origins help dyslexic learners with modern languages.
• Free in The Wordhord: the English cousins from the 'dies' root - 'diary', 'diurnal' and 'dismal'.
For personal use in home education and tutoring only.
Available now as a PDF download.
'Día' is the Spanish for 'day' - and it breaks one of the first rules a learner is taught. Words ending in '-a' are usually feminine, but it's 'el día', masculine.
There's a reason 'día' keeps a masculine gender it seems to have no right to, and it goes back a very long way. The cards follow that story, clear up why 'día' looks like the English 'day' without being related to it, and turn up a surprising distant cousin along the way.
• An illustrated black-and-white word-history in comic form - stage panels, one idea to each, following 'día' back to its Latin root, gender and all
• The word-history breakdown, Latin to modern Spanish, with a date at each stage the record allows
• A sources page listing where every claim comes from
• A short guide for the adult on how to use the cards
The PDF prints two ways, and you choose which suits you. The large cards - one idea to a page - are made to be laminated and clipped onto a single binder ring, so a child can handle them, turn them over and lay them out in order. You print, laminate, trim and bind these yourself; the cards are numbered, so a loose deck goes back in sequence. The single sheet at the end holds the whole word on one page - print it and it's ready, no laminating or cutting - for the pencil case or the middle of a lesson. You'll need a printer; a laminator and a ring are needed only for the deck.
Because the large cards come apart, there's more to do with them than read. Rebuild the timeline in order, and stop on the card that explains the gender. Put 'día' and the English 'day' next to each other and talk through why they look alike but aren't related. Hunt for the distant cousin the cards turn up. Hold up the English-cousin cards and sort them back to the root. If you own more than one word from El Taller Raíz, clip the shared cards onto one ring and put the day-words together. It's the same cards, talked through and handled differently - adult-led, a few minutes at a time, never a drill.
'Día' trips learners twice - it's masculine despite its '-a', and it looks like the English 'day' but isn't related to it. Both are the kind of exception that makes a learner distrust the rules they've just been taught. Rather than hide them, the cards explain them - each oddity has a reason a child can hold onto.
Made for secondary Spanish learners at Key Stages 3 and 4, but it suits a wider range:
• Anyone who likes where words come from
• Spanish learners in Key Stages 3 and 4, and GCSE students meeting 'día' and noun gender
• Home-educated children
• Learners who find vocabulary hard to hold when it's taught as isolated words - including dyslexic and working-memory profiles
• Parents brushing up their own Spanish, or studying alongside a child
• Adults coming back to Spanish after school
This isn't a first step into Spanish. A learner should already be meeting 'día' and 'el/la' gender in lessons - the cards explain a word, and an exception, a child is already running into. If a child hasn't started Spanish at all yet, this will come too early.
Related resources
• In El Taller Raíz: 'hoy' and 'buenos días' are the nearest neighbours - 'hoy' hides the same 'día' inside it, and 'buenos días' is 'día' made plural.
• For anyone who likes the links across languages: Italian 'oggi' and French 'aujourd'hui' carry the same Latin 'day' behind them; the 'jour' and 'giorno' words are the daylight branch of the family.
• In the Compendium: the post on why word origins help dyslexic learners with modern languages.
• Free in The Wordhord: the English cousins from the 'dies' root - 'diary', 'diurnal' and 'dismal'.
For personal use in home education and tutoring only.
Available now as a PDF download.
