Growing Your Child’s Second Language Vocabulary

With our dual language learners at home, we often struggle with non academic vocabulary. Our district does a great job teaching the specific concepts they are learning in school and helping the students to bridge their learning from Spanish to English and English to Spanish. However, we often notice that our children lack the everyday common vocabulary. Specifically, these words are so useful to learn because often times teachers assume that their students have this language because they are words used everyday in homes. This is why we focus on grouping vocabulary for language learning with our own children.

What Is Common Vocabulary?

What do I mean by everyday common vocabulary? These are words that we use every day, mostly outside of school. These words are usually learned when listening to other people speak in the home or playing. They are naturally picked up during conversation and every day tasks or activities.

For example, these are words for eating utensils: forks, spoons, knives; words used for vehicles: cars, boats, trains; most words used for dishes: cups, plates, bowls; words used for toys: blocks, cards, dolls; even more words used to describe rooms in your house: bedroom, living room, kitchen; names of foods: oranges, ham, cheese. Even though, the list can go on and on of these common everyday vocabulary, but now you get the gist.

Why are these words so important?

For beginning readers, these words appear in early reader books. While many of these words are beyond a child’s phonics skills, the pictures support figuring out the word when first learning to read. Often times books use these words in the sentence and use a picture to help the children figure out the word. Yet, if children don’t know the word in the language they are learning, they won’t be able to use picture support with phonics to figure out the word. Consequently, this will impact their ability to read.

In addition, these words are important when writing and speaking because many of the words your child will want to use when writing and sharing with friends are these everyday common vocabulary words. These words are used often in conversations with friends and when writing. As a result, if children don’t know the word in the language they are learning, they will struggle to write sentences in the target language or share experiences orally.

Why Focus on Common Vocabulary at Home?

Yet these words are usually not taught directly at school. Why aren’t they taught? Because children learn these words in their early years naturally through talking with their families. During your child’s early years, they are learning these words from listening to you speak with them. Then, they practice using these words with their family long before they begin kindergarten. Many of these words are acquired while your child plays and interacts with their environment.

Consequently, your children will have many of these words in their home language but will be lacking these words in their target language. By the time your children reaches school, it is thought most children will have a well-developed repertoire of everyday common words and so teachers spend little time on these words. Additionally, teachers have so many academic vocabulary words that they need to teach each year that these words often get overlooked.

But don’t worry, with a little focus at home, your child can learn many of these words in their second language as well.

How to Help Grow Your Child’s Vocabulary?

So what can you do to help your child? Firstly, we build dual vocabulary lists. These are vocabulary lists that use the same pictures with both the native language word and the second language word. You will find many of these in our shop. The resources in our shop are extra helpful because they present the new vocabulary in three different ways in both English and Spanish. Our vocabulary lists also pair well with our other products to help children master more than just the words, but also reading and writing skills as well.

Secondly, we ask our children to brainstorm as many words as they can in a common category. I will post a list below of many of these categories that we use. Then, we translate these words into their target language. Sometimes we write the words on post-it notes and hang them up in our house. Likewise, sometimes we find pictures for the words and make a cheat sheet with the words and pictures, and sometimes we write word pairs to practice throughout our day. Many of these lists have grown into our done for you dual language vocabulary lists for English and Spanish programs.

How to Use Vocabulary Lists?

After your children have brainstormed the list of words, record each word. For younger children, pair the words with pictures. You child can even take the picture or draw the picture. If you really cannot get a picture to match the word, do a quick internet search for a picture.

For older children, you can decide if picture support is beneficial. Many of my older learners like to create their own pictures, while others would rather create sentences or motions. Allow your child the option to pick what they would like to add. Personalizing for your child creates ownership and encouragement to review the vocabulary.

Then find little ways to include the vocabulary into your day. These can be 1 – 5 minute activities or longer activities. You can focus solely on vocabulary or sprinkle in the vocabulary to other things you do.

Quick and Easy Vocabulary for Language Learners

1. Try to brainstorm all the words from your list that you can remember. Which words did you forget?
2. While driving, try to use 2 – 5 words in a variety of sentences. See if your child can speak the entire sentence in their target language. If not, which words are they able to use?
3. Practice linking the different vocabulary words. Can you tell a story using all the different vocabulary words? Which words were the most different to add to your story? Why?
4. Design your vocabulary words. Start with your favorite word, write it large on a piece of paper. Now try to add all the other vocabulary words slowly making the size smaller and smaller as you come to less preferred words. Which word was the smallest? Why?
5. March out your vocabulary word spellings. Say one word, then march out the letters in the word to practice spelling. Do you remember what this word means?
6. Assign each word to a number on a dice. If you have more than 6 words, that’s okay, use multiple dice. Just remember that with 2 dice, you only have 11 combinations (not 12), and 3 dice has 16 combinations. Then roll the dice and write the word that matches the numbers rolled. Or you could use the word in a sentence instead.
7. Play charades. Ask your children to pick a word and then act it out for everyone else to guess. Be sure to say the word in the target language as much as possible.
8. Play Pictionary. Instead of acting out the word, try drawing the word for others to guess.
9. Create word pairs. Try to pair each word with another word from the list. Why do those two words fit together? What is their relationship? Was there any words that really didn’t fit with the list? Could you add a word to pair with the extra words?
10. Play 20 questions. Either you or your child pick a vocabulary word. The other person has 20 questions to try to guess the vocabulary word. Which question was most helpful? What question wouldn’t you ask next time?

A Little Longer Vocabulary Games for Growing Your Child’s Second Language Vocabulary

1. Play Bingo with your words. Use a blank bingo card and fill squares with the words in either language. Then use pictures or the word in the opposite language as your calling cards. We find that pictures as the calling cards and the word written in the second language work best.
2. Try a jeopardy style game. Your child would answer with the vocabulary word in the second language. The clues could include a picture, the word in the native language (English), a fill in the blank sentence in either language or both languages, synonym or antonym, definition in either language, and a rhyming word.
3. Headbandz vocabulary game. Use the headbands from the physical game (or use an app), then switch out the cards for your vocabulary word list. We like to write the word on notecards or print on cardstock for a more durable card. Without looking at the card, affix it to your headband. Then ask questions to try to figure out the word. This game is wonderful because you can give each child their own set of cards to differentiate which words they need to learn.
4. Go Fish or Memory/Concentration vocabulary game. Use the cards from the Headbandz game or make new ones. For these types of games you can pair the word in both language, pair the word with a picture, or pair the word with a sentence, synonym or antonym. Once you have the cards made, use in both types of games.
5. The Fly Swatter Game. We keep brand new fly swatters, bought at the dollar store, for this game. You could also use pointers, laser pointers, flashlights, or even hands to slap the word. Put the word cards for each vocabulary list on the table, floor, a wall, or even the refrigerator. Then say one clue or show a picture and your child needs to try to find the correct word.

Common Categories:

1. Rooms in our home
2. Places we visit
3. Toys
4. Eating Utensils and Dishes
5. Foods (for example, divide into breakfast, lunch and dinner or healthy, snacks, and treats or proteins, fruits, vegetables, dairy, grains, and fats or things we eat and things we drink)
6. Activities we enjoy
7. Clothes
8. Vehicles
9. Items we take to the specific place (for instance, beach, restaurant, mountains, camping, hotel, etc)
10. Things we see outside our house
11. Body parts
12. Illness and aches
13. Characters and places in stories
14. Things we need to sleep
15. Furniture in each room in our house
16. Items babies use
17. Emotions
18. Things we need to take care of our teeth
19. Daily routines (for example, waking up, eating, going to bed, doing our homework, making dinner, etc)
20. Common safety phrases
21. Names of animals (including, local animals, insects, pets, wild animals, birds, sea animals, etc)
22. Family Members
23. People in my community
24. Things we need when we get hurt
25. Words for special events and items we see there (for instance, weddings, funerals, births, graduations, etc)
26. Household items (appliances, lightbulbs, TV, etc)
27. Tools
28. Different types of houses and containers
29. Different buildings in our community
30. Hotel words
31. Things we see in the store
32. Different kinds of stores
33. Parts of a computer and types of electronic devices
34. Jobs
35. Manners
36. Cleaning Supplies
37. Toiletries
38. Music Instruments
39. Holidays and Celebrations
40. Sports and Equipment

Spicing Up Vocabulary for Language Learning

The beautiful part of brainstorming words for each category with your child is that the words they think of can change over time. Therefore, these same categories can be used multiple times over their schooling years and the words that they wish to learn will change each time you brainstorm. The word lists for each category can be immense and overwhelming, so each year or two, your child can add more words to one of these categories to grow their vocabulary.

Additionally, allowing your children to brainstorm a few words for a different category each week or month can really help to boost their vocabulary in their target language. When creating your word lists, they do not need to be all encompassing. Pick 5 – 10 words that your child wants to learn in the category. If your child brainstorms 20 words, that’s okay too. But don’t force it and definitely don’t try to cover every single word you can think of the first time through.

To see the research on developing a second language, view Dual Language – Why is my Child Struggling? post. This post dives into the development of language and how children’s language grows. Looking for something different for language learning, try our winter themed sensory activities. We’d love it if you would take a moment and drop us a comment on your favorite ways to build your child’s vocabulary. Looking for more strategies? Join our growing Creating Butterflies family by subscribing to our newsletter below.

Hi, I’m Nicole.

Here at Creatingbutterflies we provide families with practical solutions to real life problems for everything parenting, scouting, dual language, and enjoying time outdoors. We are a family of 6 with 4 wonderful becoming bilingual children who loves scouting, camping, and hiking with their family. Mom is an educator and dad is a firefighter/paramedic.