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Fun Facts About English #45 – Native American Vocabulary

02/21/2020 by admin Leave a Comment

The legacy of the Native American peoples and their language traveled far into the European and Asian continents brought by the Portuguese and Spanish as new world fauna, flora, and language. Many of these new-world artifacts were adopted and absorbed so thoroughly that we forget the novelty they once possessed and to whom this heritage is owed.

Take, for example the word tomato. The species originated in western South America and Central America. The Nahuatl (Aztec language) word tomatl gave rise to the Spanish word tomate, from which the English word tomato derived. The Spanish took the small yellow tomato to Europe where it grew easily in the Mediterranean climates. They also distributed the tomato throughout their colonies in the Caribbean and the Philippines, where it then spread throughout the Asian continent.

More vocabulary of Native American languages origin include:

Over half of the state names in the U.S. are of Native American origin. They include:

Familiar U.S. city names include:

Though considered extinct, the Algonquian language has been woven into our everyday lives; testament that language is a living legacy where every utterance is like a memory brought back to life.

I’ll finish with a quote by Ray Bradbury:

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder go when it dies?”

If you enjoyed this post, you might also be interested in the fascinating history of the creole language known as Gullah, the beauty of the Scots language, or the influence of Spanish and French in the English language.

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Audio stories from A Telling Story Productions are great for bedtime, travel time, or story time in class! Check out all the classic children’s fairy tales and secondary short stories that will be sure to keep your kids engaged and wanting to hear more!

Fun Facts About English #40 – The Letter ‘s’

01/17/2020 by admin Leave a Comment

Kinney Brothers Publishing Fun Facts About English 40

There are more English words beginning with the letter s than with any other letter mainly because of clusters such as sc, sh, sp, and st. Followed by some distance are words that begin with p, c, d, m, and a.

According to Wolfram Language, a computational knowledge engine, in a list of 40,127 common words, s has 4,635 entries – as compared to x which only has 11. This simple Wolfram word cloud expresses the most frequent initial letters in the English language:

Bear in mind that the frequency of initial letters has no relationship to how often letters occur in English in general. E is the most common letter, followed by t and then a.

If you enjoy learning fun facts about the English language, you may be interested in reading about The Power of X, why Americans say /zee/ when the rest of the world says /zed/, or how the ampersand (&) was once part of the English alphabet!

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Donald's English Classroom Fun Facts About English 40

Add punch to your classroom decor! Visit Donald’s English Classroom for wall maps and wall art, charts, pennants, and so much more!

Fun Facts About English #39 – The English Alphabet

01/10/2020 by admin Leave a Comment

Fun Facts About English 39 Kinney Brothers Publishing

History of the Latin Alphabet Kinney Brothers Publishing

In brief, the English word alphabet came into Middle English from the Late Latin word alphabetum. The Latin word originated in the Greek ἀλφάβητος (alphabētos). Alphabētos was made from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet; aleph, (ox), and bet, (house). Wikipedia

Map of Phoenicia Kinney Brothers Publishing

Phoenicia was an ancient Semitic speaking Mediterranean civilization that originated in the Levant (west of the Fertile Crescent), in modern-day Lebanon that included coastal Syria and northern Palestine. The civilization advanced across the Mediterranean between 1500 BC and 300 BC.

Developed around 1050 BC, the Phoenician alphabet was spread by merchants and became one of the most widely used scripts in the Mediterranean world. This was in contrast to other contemporary writing systems such as Cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Phoenician script was made up of only a couple dozen distinct letters and was simple enough for common traders to learn. Another advantage of the Phoenician alphabet was that it could be used to write different languages as it was one of the first scripts to record words phonemically.

In Greece, the Phoenician script was modified and vowels were added. In the archaic and early classical years, there were many variants of the Greek alphabet until they were replaced around 400 BC by the classical 24-letter Euboean alphabet that is the standard today.

Greek Pottery Kinney Brothers Publishing — Early Greek Alphabet Wikipedia

The Euboean form was carried by Greek colonists to the Italian peninsula where it gave rise to a variety of alphabets used to write the Italic languages. One such variant was developed by the Etruscans, a civilization of central Italy. The Etruscan abecedarium evolved into the Classical Latin alphabet. The Latin alphabet spread across Europe as the Romans expanded their empire. After the fall of the Roman state, the alphabet survived in intellectual and religious works. Lowercase letters were adopted in the Middle Ages. The script came into use for descendant Latin (Romantic) languages and then for most of the other languages of Europe, including English.

If you enjoyed reading this post, you might also be interested in learning more about the Old English adoption of the Latin script, why Great Britain means “land of the tattooed,” or why the feminine word widow is so unique in the English language!

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Donald's English Classroom Kinney Brothers Publishing

From pre-k through adult language learners, Kinney Brothers Publishing offers you textbooks and supplemental materials for your ESL classes. Download these textbooks (and more!) as PDF files from Donald’s English Classroom!

Fun Facts About English #36 – The Origins of Baseball

12/20/2019 by admin 1 Comment

Donald's English Classroom Fun Facts About English 36 Baseball

The full title of the British children’s book reads: A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, Intended for the Instruction and Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly With Two Letters from Jack the Giant Killer. Generally considered the first children’s book, it includes rhymes for each of the letters of the alphabet. The pocket-sized book was marketed with a ball for boys and a pincushion for girls. Popular in England, the book was re-published in Colonial America in 1762.

A Little Pretty Pocket-Book by John Newbery Kinney Brothers Publishing
Baseball Reference

The book was published with woodcuts of many period games, and included a rhyme entitled “Base-Ball.”

The Ball once struck off,
Away flies the Boy,
To the next destin’d Post,
And then Home with Joy.

Base-Ball A Little Pretty Pocket-Book by John Newbery Kinney Brothers Publishing Earliest Baseball Reference

Though this is the first known reference to “base-ball” in print, it was actually referring to “rounders,” a game played in England since the Tudor period. Rounders was described as “…a striking and fielding team game, which involves hitting a small hard leather-cased ball with a round wooden or metal bat and then running around four bases in order to score.”

In the book, Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game (2005), American baseball historian, David Block, argues that rounders and early base-ball were regional variants of each other and that the game’s most direct antecedents are the English games of “stool-ball” and “tut-ball.”

The game was brought by immigrants to North America where the modern version developed. By the late 19th century, baseball was widely recognized as the national sport of the United States. Today, baseball is also popular in parts of Central and South America, the Caribbean, and East Asia, particularly in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

You might also enjoy reading about the history of acronyms like SCOTUS, the origins of the word dude, or the shocking story of American spelling bees!

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Build a Four Seasons Tree Stand as useful classroom decoration or interactive notebook project with your students! ESL House and Community Places craft-activities are not only fun folding activities, they’re excellent 3D references in class! Wall maps offer a visual opportunity for language building exercises you’re sure to use year in and year out! Check out these and more fun activities in Donald’s English Classroom!

Using Maps in Class

12/11/2019 by admin Leave a Comment

When I began learning Japanese in the early 80s, it was imperative that I learn how to ask for directions from the get-go – especially in Tokyo. Not only did I have to deal with my lacking sense of direction, I was also functionally illiterate as I didn’t know any Japanese when I first arrived. A guide book and a paper train map were always in my bag. I also remember the huge city map on the kitchen wall in the foreigner’s house where I lived; an invaluable reference for fresh-off-the-boat travelers like me. To whatever train station I might be going, I regularly stopped at the local police box to ask directions – even if I already knew where I was going. Why? It was excellent language practice and I milked it.

Looking back, I was lucky. I was in the real world, immersed in a new language, and learning daily. Because we teach in a box, we have to find inventive ways to bring meaningful, real-world language into the classroom. Maps offer a visual opportunity for building language skills.

In my own book publications, I created maps and activities that are included in the Phonics & Spelling series, Q&A worksheets, and referenced for nearly every story in the Stories For Young Readers textbooks. I wanted my kids to know where they are in the world, learn about someplace new, and not be afraid to ask for directions or offer help to someone in need.

Stories For Young Readers Lesson Packs Kinney Brothers Publishing

Consider all the language used when dealing with maps:

geographical vocabulary – rivers, lakes, mountains
community places, cities, capitals, countries
prepositions of place – in, on, in front of, behind
directionals – north, south, right, left, forward, back, around
ordinal numbers
grammar tenses – past, present, and future
map vocabulary – legends, icons, scales

Donald's English Classroom Community Places

Starting early…

As my kids get older and catch on to the fact that I don’t really swim from the U.S. to Japan every day, we start learning community places, easy country names, and playing games with flags. Flags are already familiar to many sports-minded kids and there’s no reason to be ignorant about your favorite team’s home turf. In preparation for the Jidou Eiken tests, community place names and geographic vocabulary are a regular part of my flashcard activities. Keep in mind, these kinds of exercises can be just as informative and entertaining in your adult ESL classes!

When students begin moving about in their community and become aware that some people come from other places, like me, we start working with maps. Map activities pull together a variety of language skills — language you’ve probably been teaching your kids since they were little! It begins with prepositions of place and sight words like at, in, on, next to, and in front of. Interrogatives like where, what, and how come early on when asking the most rudimentary questions.

Once students develop informational reading skills, we look at town maps and tackle exercises in asking for and giving directions. We start with simple commands like Turn right! Turn left! and Go straight! Similar to community flashcard exercises in the past, students express where they are or want to go on the maps, e.g., I want to go to the station, or I’m at the library. Especially with large classes, big wall maps are essential for leading students through these types of activities.

Map making…

I went out in search of maps for my classroom many times and in many places around Tokyo. I could never find what I was looking for! Available maps were the wrong language, too expensive, too complicated, too big, too small, and so on. Yes, I’m picky, and I’m not going to have something in my classroom simply for decoration. What I wanted were easy-to-read and colorful wall maps appropriate for upper-elementary ESL kids in English. Simple to find, right? Nope.

So, I started creating my own. Because I don’t have a poster-size printer, I resized digital images and created wall maps out of regular sheets of paper. The students and I glued them together as a class activity, and viola! I have wall maps of each continent, a town map for practicing directions, and a U.S. map so I can talk about where I came from. Each map is dedicated to the class that helped put it together with a picture of the students and the date.

Doald's English Classroom Map Instructions

I also wanted the maps to be an interactive resource in my lesson plans. So, along with the wall maps, I created charts, worksheets, plus blank and numbered maps for classroom activities and handouts for students’ interactive notebooks. These are items not normally sold with maps you buy at a bookstore. Importantly, all the student materials are congruent with the wall maps and I’m not hobbling together different resources to create a series of lessons.

I’m pleased to say, these maps are now available in my online store. Click on the images to learn more. I hope you find these maps useful in your own classes.

Map Worksheets Kinney Brothers Publishing

Playing with maps…

Here are some map activities I’ve found particularly useful in class. If you have some activities you especially enjoy, help a teacher out and let us know in the comments below!

Create your own town! With a blank town map and a list of community places, allow students to create their own towns! Then have students ask and give directions based on their created maps. Let students visit each other’s town or vote on their favorite town!
Give students a numbered or blank map. Beginning with a labeled place, like a station, dictate directions and have students label the place of arrival on their own maps. This works well as an assessment of lessons taught.
Ask students to imagine a country they’d like to travel to for vacation. Create an outline of topics you would like them to research: weather, geography, food, history, etc. This is great grammar practice for future conditionals. With the online tools available for research, the possibilities are endless!

Historical maps Kinney Brothers Publishing

For practice with past tense, display a historical map next to a current map. This activity gets your students really scanning a map closely to discover the differences.
Teachers who teach from their home country are more likely to have students from a variety of places. A map can be a wonderful springboard for enjoyable and informative language practice. Pin the countries where students are from or have traveled to on a world map. Students love to talk about what they know best: their home country and all its unique cultural differences!

Finally, if you’re teaching about the United States and want your students to know their state names, capitals, and regions, check out my post on U.S.A. Maps and download a free map puzzle!

I hope this post encourages you to consider using maps more often in your ESL lessons. I’ll finish with a favorite quote:

I was completely drawn to other lands. I discovered with time that it’s a thirst for other people, for otherness, for something fascinating and mysterious. Robert Lepage

As always, best of luck in your classes!
Donald Kinney