About this activity
Fourteen Spanish words with the che sound: chico, chile, chocolate, chaqueta, churro, coche, leche, mochila, cuchara, noche, ocho, lucha, mucho, muchacho. The sound appears at the start and in the middle, and muchacho has it twice — a useful hardest case at the end of the deck.
How to use it in a session
Split the affricate into its parts if the student is substituting. Che is a stop released into a fricative, and cueing the tongue to touch first usually helps more than repeating the whole sound. Do the initial-position words — chico, chocolate, chaqueta — before the medial ones like leche and mochila, since position matters here as it does in English. Six minutes covers a subset.
What to listen for
Listen for what replaces it. A plain fricative — she for che — means the stop is missing; a plain stop means the fricative release is. Those need different cues. Watch muchacho, which has two targets in three syllables, and mochila, where the sound sits in an unstressed syllable and is quietest.
Carrying it home
Leche, coche, noche and mochila are everyday words in a Spanish-speaking home. Asking a family to listen for one of them rather than the sound in general gives them something they can actually track.
Questions
- Is this board in Spanish?
- Yes, all fourteen words are Spanish. This page is in English so an English-speaking clinician can find and evaluate it.
- Is it free?
- Yes, no account and no card needed.
- What ages is it for?
- Kindergarten through second grade, for Spanish-speaking students working on the che sound.