The Spanish Experiment Stories
Description:
This site has well-known children's stories, translated into Spanish and spoken by a native Spanish speaker. They provide a transcript and wonderful illustrations. Some also have a video to watch.
Activity Ideas:
Interpretive: Use the "mapa del cuento 1" from this website to take notes about the setting, characters, main conflict, events and conclusion. Also, teacher takes the text from a short text and cuts it into strips. As they listen/read the book, students need to put the text into the correct order focusing on transitions. As a follow-up, they could change the order of a couple of the strips and discuss how that might change the story.
Interpersonal: Before opening the text and reading of the story, use the image shown on the introductory page to predict what will happen and share out with a classmate.
Presentational: Think of a fairytale or book that you read when you were younger. Write down a summarized version of the story in only 10-15 lines including an original ending. Draw or find a picture from the Internet to represent each line. Then, read each line of the story and present the corresponding picture.
Global Storybooks
Description:
Global Storybooks is a free multilingual literacy resource for children and youth worldwide. Read, download, toggle, and listen to a wide variety of illustrated storiesActivity Ideas:
Based on the book "Un hombre muy alto"
Interpretive: Students make a chart of all the things that are too small or too short in the life of the man from the story.
Interpersonal: After reading this book students go around and find someone who: a) owns something that's too small for them b) knows what "demasiado" means c) can think of a really tall person in their life
Presentational: Students rewrite the story and create an alternate ending. They present all the same problems, solutions and then end the story differently. Another great idea is for
students to create their own sale flyer to advertise several of the books found on the website (much like the Scholastic book flyers many students have seen). To do this, the teacher can create a template and have students write the “hook” or short description that would make someone want to buy or read the books.
Spanish Uno
Description:
A collection of stories, jokes, sayings, dialogues, recipes, and many other short readings are very accessible to students. Most of the words in the texts are glossed so students can hover over them and see their meaning.
Get Epic!
Description:
This digital library offers Spanish, Bilingual, and Chinese books for kids. Readers can hear each book read to them and easily follow along as the narrator underlines the words as they are said. Readers can also magnify words and click on them to get a definition. Books can be sorted by book type as well as age of reader/level.
Activity Ideas:
Interpretive: As the text is read aloud, students are provided with a series of faces expressing different emotions (see below). Students point to the face that represents the emotions of a given character in that moment of the text. Some students could represent the hero/heroine and some could represent the villain.
Interpersonal: After reading the text, students are provided with a list of sentence prompts based on the beginning, middle and end of the text. With a partner, they must select one of the speaking frames from each segment and complete it.
Presentational: Using the emotion chart below, students are given one of the faces and must change the ending of the book to match the emotion they received. They can write a new ending, develop a polished skit, or make an audio book.
Mundo primaria
Description:
This website offers over twenty longer children's stories that have been illustrated and narrated with different voices. There are Flash-based stories where students can click to advance the story and there are videos of the stories being read. It should be noted that this site also includes various games to practice math, science, and other school subjects.
Activity Ideas:
Interpretive: Students are assigned to different stories and interactively read them. Then, students have to summarize the story in a Twitter tweet, limited to only 140 characters. They can use Twitter or simulate a Twitter post. After posting, students create a hashtag to summarize the main idea of that story. For example, a plot tweet such as "Cinderella made it to the ball with help from all types of creatures" would receive a hashtag like #micerule or #animalconnection.
Interpersonal: Silly-libs: Everyone loves silly-libs where two people work together and one person requests nouns, adjectives, adverbs, proper nouns from the other to plug into an incomplete passage based on one of the interactive stories. Once complete, the silly passage is read and laughs ensue.
Presentational: Students are provided with 30 different writing frames such as "It was really interesting when ________ did _______ because ______". The writing frames are divided into five from the beginning of the text, five from the middle, and five from the end. Students must select two writing frames from each section to comment on the text. It is enjoyable to choose writing frames rather than requiring the same for each student.
Cuentos para dormir
Description:
This site offers classic and new children's stories based on different values such as friendship, humility, and responsibility. The site includes multimedia stories, audio-stories, and text stories. There are also teacher resources including activity ideas.
Activity Ideas:
Interpretive: After listening or watching one of the stories, students decide the moral of the story. If students need more scaffolding, the teacher could prepare a worksheet with various morals listed and as the students listen they could circle which moral is best represented in the audiobook. Students then illustrate the moral of the story.
Interpersonal: The teacher creates a Guion series, or a logical sequence of 6-8 sentences, based on one of the stories. The class is taught the sequence of actions and words and learns it so well that they can individually retell it.
Presentational: Students listen to various stories to familiarize themselves with how to write a story with a moral. Next, using the morals on the site, each student is given five morals from which they select one to write an original story. Before beginning to write, the students read 2-3 stories with that same moral and try to come up with other examples of stories they know with a similar moral. Then, they write an original story that justifies one of the morals listed on the website. The students record the story to create an audio book or read the story to the class. After they read, the class must guess which moral was targeted in the story by writing the moral on a mini-white board and holding it up for the author to see (See list of Morals from Cuentos para dormir).
Unite for Literacy
Description:
This site has a wonderful library of books that students can virtually page through. Students are also able to hear the books and follow along. Categories include animals, nature, outdoors, food, earth, community, family, friends, health, technology, culture, and more.
Árbol ABC Cuentos
Description:
Students can read and hear stories from several different categories such as: classic stories, legends, fables, scary stories, stories about princesses, poems, and more.
Based on the story "Todos tenemos un amigo"
Interpretive: Students are put into small
groups. Each group is given some pictures representing the animal characters from the story as well as their problems.
The class would then have to try to match each animal with their problem. (i.e. “¡El rinoceronte tiene las garrapatas!” or "El cocodrilo no puede lavarse los dientes").
Interpersonal: Students
form two circles, one inside the other. Students in the outer circle are given a picture of an animal from the story and students in the inner circle are given a picture of their problems. The person in the inner circle says “¿Tienes garrapatas?” and
the person in the outer circle needs to respond accordingly “Soy el cocodrilo y no tengo garrapatas”. When they find their match, they say "El pájaro va a ayudar" and they can have a seat until all the problems have been resolved.
Presentational: Students create a short book about three problems they have and a family member or friend who always helps them out (in the same format as this book). The book could be non-fiction or fiction but should include illustrations of each of their problems.
Texts
Description:
The Mexican government has provided access to many textbooks currently used from pre-school to post-secondary. (Use the arrow keys to flip through the books)