Picture Books for Spanish 1-3!
I plundered the Spanish kids book section at my local library. I’ve got 9 books to peruse and plan around.
First, we have some recipe books to complement the cooking unit for Spanish I:
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| Available at Amazon |
Most recipes are under a page and include some very Mexican ingredients (nopales, anyone?) This would justify going to the tienda for supplies, but also potentially provide an opportunity to explore substitution. Also, we had a few vegetarians this year, so we might next year too.
If it’s simple enough for kids, it should be simple enough for 9th graders, right! They might not be traditional recipes, but they can certainly reinforce vocabulary used in traditional recipes.
La Cocina para Nino y Ninas is as old as I am, and it uses literary Castellano (pelad y cortad your bananas), but it might be interesting to show some vosotros forms.
Some other books look like they’d be pretty good for teaching various verb forms for Spanish 2:
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We have a lot of repetition and some fancy around-the-house art that students could imitate here. This has very clear examples of third person singular preterite over and over (a la “The House that Jack Built”), and I’d love to see students create similar books (or mixbooks?)
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We have some good examples of present participles for -AR verbs here, with some familiar vocabulary from Spanish I. This is another one that could be quickly and easily imitated for a student project. It would be fun to write books like these and take them on the road to read to local elementary ESL classes!
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| Available at Amazon |
This one also has familiar family and cooking words from Spanish I, and plenty of preterite and imperfect, as well as object pronouns for analysis. It turns out this is some kind of Burmese folktale, so I’m not sure how that fits. It is a little complicated, but the emphasis here might be the pictures and other context clues, like dialogue format.
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| Available at Amazon |
The sound play here is my favorite part, but there’s also some good past tense in here. There is a lot of unfamiliar vocabulary, but also some food words to relate back to last year.
I also got a couple of more advanced books that I might try with Spanish 3:
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| Available at Amazon |
Luis J. Rodriguez knows youth audiences, and this is an interesting picture book about an immigrant girl’s life in Chicago–shootings and all. I like that it’s set in the U.S.. Also, different sections of the book have different tenses for different reasons, including past subjunctive, so if I want to focus on those things, I can!
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| Available at Amazon |
This book still has pictures, but it’s a little longer. I thought the Spanish 3 kids might enjoy a little fairy-tale-type reading, too, this one being based on “un cuento tradicional.” I’m hoping that I can leave a novel with a reader response kit type situation when I’m out after Christmas, so this might help build up to that.
