What's Collo?
Collo it!
Collo is short for collocation. Collocations are pairs or small groups of words that occur together frequently in spoken and written language.
A collo “just sounds right” because we hear it and see it
over and over again.
Strong coffee, heavy traffic, get the phone, and miss the bus are collos.
So are sodium chloride, Baltimore, Maryland and 7 X 6 = 42 .
There is nothing grammatically incorrect about heavy coffee or strong traffic; but
neither combination sounds natural. In English, miss the bus sounds right. Lose the bus sounds wrong. Miss the bus is considered correct because it is “what we say.”
(In Spanish, the collo is lose the bus).
If you're from the U.S., Baltimore and Maryland probably collo. But how about Caracas and Venezuela or Kampala and Uganda? These city-country combinations
might seem "harder," but this is only because we must be exposed to them many times before they collo.
A collo “just sounds right” because we hear it and see it
over and over again.
Strong coffee, heavy traffic, get the phone, and miss the bus are collos.
So are sodium chloride, Baltimore, Maryland and 7 X 6 = 42 .
There is nothing grammatically incorrect about heavy coffee or strong traffic; but
neither combination sounds natural. In English, miss the bus sounds right. Lose the bus sounds wrong. Miss the bus is considered correct because it is “what we say.”
(In Spanish, the collo is lose the bus).
If you're from the U.S., Baltimore and Maryland probably collo. But how about Caracas and Venezuela or Kampala and Uganda? These city-country combinations
might seem "harder," but this is only because we must be exposed to them many times before they collo.
Numbers Collo, Too!
A game of Collo and Smack!
To multiply numbers, we need to understand how multiplication works. It is useless to know that 7 X 6 = 42 without first knowing that seven sets of six (or six sets of seven) equal forty-two.
However, once we've internalized multiplication as a process, it is no longer necessary to calculate high-frequency equations; indeed, doing so slows down our fluency, making it more difficult to multiply fractions, decimals, and percents or apply this knowledge in word problems and practical situations.
When we multiply three by three, we don't need to imagine three sets of three to get nine. 3 X 3 = 9 is a collo. We visualize it as a single chunk of information. The same is true for 7 X 6 = 42 or any other equation, once we've seen it or heard it enough.
The 3 Rs: Relax, Repeat, Remember
Colloing the deck before a game.
When we're relaxed, having fun, and exposed to
multiple repetitions of meaningful material,
we naturally chunk the material into collos, which we can easily store and retrieve from memory. ColloTunes
and ColloCards provide the repetitive practice (and FUN!) we need to build SPARK! for higher-order thinking skills in English language arts, mathematics, science, social studies, and foreign languages.
