Stress in Compound Words

Hello, students!

Today was fun, eh? We have two new students in the class: Federico and Tania. Welcome to Canada and welcome to the class.

We started off the class by listening to two sentences: Barack Obama lives in the White House. My friend lives in a white house. I asked you if you could hear a difference in how I said "white house" in each sentence.

Angela said she noticed that the stress is on the first word in White House. We also noticed that White House sounds like one word. That's right. The two words are said together without a pause between them.

We talked about two kinds of compound nouns. They can be made from noun plus another noun, like bookcase, lunch box, key chain, post office. They can also be made from other parts of speech plus a noun, such as adjective plus noun. For example: greenhouse, darkroom, yellow jacket, hot dog.

We practiced some minimal sentences aloud as a class and then in pairs. Our partners had to hold up one finger or two to indicate which they thought we were saying: the compound noun or the descriptive phrase.

Next we played a game. I put eight pictures on the board. There was a picture of the White House and a picture of a white house. There was a picture of a greenhouse and a picture of a green house. There was a picture of a wasp and a picture of a yellow jacket with black buttons. There was a picture of a warm canine and a picture of a frankfurter in a bun with mustard on top.

One person from each team came to the board and took a marker. Bashar said, "Show me the White House," and each player rushed to circle the correct picture. Florin also took a turn calling out the sentences.

For our last activity, I passed out glossy pictures from clothing and furniture catalogs and asked you to find compound words on the pages. But it was tricky, because I had some regular descriptive phrases mixed in. You all found some great examples of compounds.

In clothing, we found: bucket hat, sun glasses, sun hat, golf hat, tank top, halter top, trademark, etc. On the pages from an IKEA catalog, you found step stool, floor lamp, work lamp, coffee table, love seat, arm chair and more.

For the last few minutes, you made sentences about your pictures using the compound words. Federico said, "I need a step stool to change the light bulb." He used TWO compounds in the same sentence. Way to go, Federico!

Have a nice weekend. I'll see you all on Monday.