About this activity
Twelve academic cognates matched across the two languages: familia and family, animal and animal, hospital and hospital, doctor and doctor, música and music, problema and problem, número and number, planta and plant, círculo and circle, historia and history, observar and observe, comparar and compare. For a Spanish-speaking student, cognates are vocabulary already owned in one language and waiting to be claimed in the other.
How to use it in a session
Read both members of each pair aloud together, because the connection is heard before it is seen and the spelling differences can obscure it. The last two pairs are the valuable ones — observar and comparar are academic verbs that appear in test instructions, and a student who recognises them has a route into English rubric language through Spanish. Ask what changes between the pair: the -ar to -e pattern in observar and observe is a rule that unlocks a long list of other verbs.
What to listen for
Watch for the student generating new pairs. A student who offers celebrar and celebrate has found the pattern rather than memorised twelve items, and that is the whole point of cognate instruction. Notice the pronunciation shifts — hospital is spelled identically and stressed differently, and a student may not recognise a word they know when it is said in the other language.
Carrying it home
Cognates are worth pointing out in whichever language a family is reading in. When an English word looks like a Spanish one, saying so takes a second and builds a strategy the student can use on their own.
Questions
- Is this activity in Spanish?
- It works across both languages — each pair has a Spanish and an English member. The page is in English so an English-speaking clinician can evaluate it, but the board is bilingual by design.
- Do I need an account?
- No, it plays free in the browser.
- Why are cognates worth teaching explicitly?
- Because the transfer does not happen automatically. Students often fail to notice that a word they know in Spanish is nearly the same word in English, and pointing it out converts existing knowledge into usable English vocabulary.