If you read last’s week’s text, you are aware that Mark’s Text Terminal is bereft of cogent or compelling–let alone relevant–materials for Weekly Texts for Hispanic Heritage Month 2024. I want, indeed I need, to remedy this situation. For a variety of entirely uninteresting personal reasons, I haven’t the stamina this fall to pull together new materials.
However, I can make a case for this lesson on the Latin word root aqua. It means, as you already know, water. The Spanish word, agua, is obviously a cognate; like aqua in English, it is an extremely vigorous root in Spanish, yielding common words like, aguacate (“avocado”), aguacero (“shower, downpour”) and aguado (“diluted, watered-down”). In English, this root gives us such high-frequency English words as aquarium, aqueduct, aquatic, and aqueous. Spanish-speakers, I argue, benefit from finding commonalities in roots in English and Spanish.
I start this lesson with this context clues worksheet on the noun vapor to point students in the general directions of analyzing and identifying this word root. This scaffolded worksheet, replete with Romance-language cognates, is the principal work of this lesson.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
Mark's Text Terminal 
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