One day I got the idea of taking the students around the campus and pointing out various sites and what went on there. They had to take notes on our walking tour. This was Russian class.
They enjoyed it but what surprised me was how much I was able to label in Russian they already knew. Medpunkt for the nurse’s office, tennisovaya ploshchadka for tennis court, avtomobil’naya ploshchad for parking lot, etc. Ploshchad and ploshchadka they knew from Krasnaya Ploshchad’ = Red Square; tennisovy is a cognate; medpunkt I broke down into ’meditsin’ and ’punkt’ (point) as ’gde medsestra rabotaet’ = where the nurse works (medsestra = medical sister), so there were a number of things going on, the biggest one being context.
My friend, a Spanish teacher, would take his students on walks around the neighborhood; same thing.