Building a Lexicon Is Boring

After some more drilling on the words to play Loteria in Spanish, one of the boys complained, “This is boring (aburrido).” I said, “I don’t understand Spanish,” and he countered, in Spanish, with, “Who knows how to say this in English” with a tone that insisted: Nobody does. I cheerfully offered, “I do.”

But I have to agree that sometimes learning, especially mass acquisition of nouns (as we are currently doing), even with the goal of playing a game, can be quite tedious. So we drew the words on Monday. I commanded: Draw a frog, a crown, the dead, a bottle, the sun, a scorpion, etc.

Then, on Wednesday we played with clay. Still boring? For Kevin, yes, but most of us now own about half of the deck and can rattle the words off in English when presented with the word in Spanish or in Spanish as we hear the English word. And, we can even offer both when we see the picture of, for example, a moon or a spider.

While the other half of the deck: harp, heron, heart, hero, drunk, musician, parrot proves to be somewhat daunting, we confront boredom and, with our brains flooded with this new lexicon, begin to grab on to whatever we can in order to win one sticker or a single piece of gum.