MEET THE ANIMALS!, by Stephane Husar and Loïc Méhée

Today I'm talking about the second book of Cat and Mouse, edited by Anaya, that invite our young learners to get to know the animals!

Meet the Animals Cover

As animals are their favorite subject at this age (3-4-5) you won't have any problem capturing their total attention.

Exactly like in the previous one, Cat and Mouse - Learn the Colours!, we'll meet again the main protagonists, the big-headed orange cat and the little squeaky mouse, but this time they will introduce us to some farm and jungle animals.

The dialogue structure is repetitive and catchy and apart from animals' names we'll also discover their noises. Do you know what kind of noise a sheep makes?

After reading it I added some more activities as always.

First of all I seized the moment to teach the most appropriate song 'Old MacDonald' mentioning the farm animals we saw in the book.

I used this song during the next classes to play 'Musical Chairs' and the 'Statue Game': they were allowed to dance when the music was on but they had to freeze in position and hold it when the music was off.

Then I stuck some flashcards representing the animals from the book on the wall and lined my kids up into two queues. When I called out an animal they had to run towards the right card and touch it. 

You can also make the noise and they have to say the name and touch the corresponding animal.

Another game they love is performing the animals. Make them sit on the floor in a semicircle, call a student out, show him a card. He has to perform the animal and the rest of the class has to guess the animal performed.

Afterwards you can play again the "I spy" and "I can see a…across the sea" games. 

Finally if you have worksheets to color, that will help too.

This book has also a CD that you can use to make them listen and repeat. 

Actually it contains a lot of nature's sounds and my pupils enjoyed it quite a lot.

I still haven't tried the 'Theatre', but I've already noticed them saying stray sentences from the book, so I imagine it's not going to be difficult to arrange it. 

Have fun!

LEARN THE COLOURS! by Stephane Husar and Loïc Méhée

A new school year has just begun and I've been assigned to a pre-school mixed group of old students of mine, aged 5, and new students, aged 3.

The main challenge, in this situation, is how to present topics that my old pupils already know to the new ones without being boring and using material and books they haven't seen yet.

It's a really difficult problem to work out!

Fortunately, I came across this bilingual book collection, 'Aprende Inglés con Cat and Mouse', edited by Anaya, which in some way partially solves my problem, at least until Christmas! 

The first book I've been using over the past two weeks talks about colors, as you can read on the title. 

Cat and Mouse are the main characters who will show many balloons and teach your kids what colors they are.

The book scheme is really basic and repetitive, the pictures are colorful and bright: elements, as already mentioned in my previous post about teaching from books, that make it easier to convince young minds that a new language can be simple and fun to learn.

To complete the color experience I added complementary fun activities to involve all my students' faculties in the learning process.

First day:

I read the book aloud and then I played the game 'Touch something… Red!' 

As you can imagine it's a game where they have to run around the classroom to touch something colored as I require.

Finally we sat down to paint a clown holding several balloons, each one had an assigned color written in it. This way the oldest children could start reading and recognizing the colors' spelling while the youngest ones just had to listen to me pronouncing the color's name and choose the right crayon to paint the balloon.

Second day:

We listened to the Cd that comes with the book, repeating the lines.

Then I drew some balloons on several sheets and let the children paint them using their favorite color.

Afterwards, using the same drawings, we played a game they really love.

There is a child who's the captain of the ship and stands alone at one side of the classroom. At the opposite side, there is the rest of the class (lees one) holding usually flashcards but in this case the sheets previously painted.

Finally there is one kid who's going to be the shark, placed more or less at the same distance from the captain and the rest of the classmates.

When the captain calls out a card, pronouncing these words "I can see, I can see a blue balloon across the see!!!", the student holding the blue card has to run towards him avoiding the dangerous shark's clutches!

This game is also helpful to start to get used to saying adjectives before nouns.

Third day:

I proposed that we perform a little play using the book's lines as a script.

So, two by two, each one holding a flashcard respectively showing a cat and a mouse, recited the lines while the rest of us were holding the sheets with the different colored balloons.

I can say it was great and un unexpected success!

The oldest ones, after just a minute, were acting by themselves and the youngest were, little by little, recognizing and pronouncing the correct balloon's color. 

Beside, it's an activity you can repeat several times over the month. It seems they don't get tired of it! 

After the 'theatre' we sat down to play the "I spy" game. 

Display some animals flashcards on the table (but you can use anything colored), and then say: "I spy something with my little eye…" They must ask "What color is ti?" Tell them the color you're thinking about and they have to point to the card showing the color you said.

In this case the oldest were reviewing animal vocabulary at the same time that the youngest enjoyed the pointing experience. They loved it!

I hope I've been helpful. I'll soon review more books and present more related games and activities.

You can take a look at the whole collection on Anaya's page: Aprendo inglés con Cat and Mouse

The BFG by Roald Dahl

What does a human bean from Turkey taste like?

If you don't know the answer, go and ask the Bonecruncher Giant.

He will certainly know. Every night Bonecruncher is galloping off to Turkey to gobble Turks.

The BFG Cover

What about human beans from Panama, Wales or Jersey? Each region has a peculiar taste, and for the giants, galloping off to one or another place is,  to us, like opening the fridge and deciding what to have for dinner.

It doesn't sound extremely encouraging if you're a little orphan who's just been snatched by a big-eared giant. Does it?

Sophie, our little heroine, has been taken from the orphanage, but actually, she has been saved from the horrible Mrs Clonkers, who punished children locking them in the dark cellar for 24 hours with nothing to eat or drink (Does that ring a bell?). 

She is inspired by the author's niece, Sophie, and is the first girl to appear as a protagonist in one of Dahl's books; a busybody little kid who will find the solution and the courage to stop giants' night incursions to gobble human beans.

She has good luck because the giant who kidnapped her is the Big Friendly Giant, whose hobby is to hunt dreams, to blow them into the bedroom of those sleeping children he visits during the witching hour.

Dreams, he says, is very mysterious thing.They is floating around in the air… And they are like bubbles making just a little buzzing-humming noise, imperceptible by human beans. 

They live in the Dream Country together with nightmares. 

Only the BFG, thanks to his special big ears, can hear them and is able to catch and lock them into a glass jar. 

Thousand of jars that he accurately collects and classifies; each one has its label with an accurate description of the dream inside. There are dreams  suitable for all tastes ready to be blown through the long trumpet every night.

The BFG spreads nice lovely dreams exactly like Dahl tells his stories, collected over his life, to enrich children's imagination.

With his super ears he can also hear all the secret whispering of the world.

From ladybirds to plants he demonstrates Sophie that every living thing on the Earth has a soul and gives us a great lesson of ecology.

Sophie is afraid to be eaten but the BFG shows her what kind of food he lives on to avoid eating people: Snozzcumbers! A sort of enormous black and white striped cucumbers, that are the only vegetables capable of growing in the desolate land of Giants, but they taste of frogskin and rotten fish! 

But not all the children are as lucky as her, because many of them  will soon disappear during the night, swallowed by a nasty giant.

So she decides that something has to be done immediately to save children's lives and convinces the BFG to prepare a terrible nightmare that will be blown into the very Queen of England's room to make her aware of the terrible facts, but most importantly,  will reveal to her the existence of the BFG.

Will the Queen believe to a dream? Will the little orphan manage to be heard? And will the BFG be treated with respect and not as a circus attraction?

I warmly recommend you to read this book. It's adventurous, it's fun, it's full of strange words, but especially it teaches us to see things from a different perspective.

http://www.roalddahlfans.com/games/quiz.php?quizID=4

http://www.derbylive.co.uk/documents/TheBFGEducationPack.pdf


Lucy dedicates a lot of time and love to thinking about and writing the posts she shares with all of you. Because she believes that a better teaching is the key for a better future. If you find any help, value or joy in this blog, please consider becoming a supporting reader. A donation, in any amount, will be gratefully accepted. 

                                                   

TREASURE ISLAND by Robert Luis Stevenson

Had Mr Stevenson decided to keep studying engineering or law instead of following his real interest, literature, no kid since 1881 would have enjoyed this masterpiece of children's literature.

He wrote it for his 12-year-old stepson, Lloyd, and it quickly became a bestseller.

This great success was due, on the one hand, to the new ideas about children's education introduced by the recent Romantic movement,  as I've already mentioned in my Peter Pan post, and, on the other hand, to compulsory schooling that increased the literacy among the working class and consequently the audience.
Finally, new advances in printing technology allowed publishers to add colorful illustrations to books to appeal the young readers.

Actually, the map of the island, where the bloodthirstiest pirate ever to sail the Seven Seas, Cap'n Flint, had buried his 'booty' could be found in all the printed editions of the book and it gives us an idea of the adventures full of suspense we'll have if we join Jim Hawkins and the crew of the Hispaniola throughout the Caribbean sea.

The narrator is Jim, a young boy who lives and works at the Admiral Benbow Inn with his parents. At a certain point an old seaman, Billy Bones, holding a big sea-chest, appears at the door of the Inn and decides to stay for a long time, drinking huge quantities of rum a telling pirates' stories, until one day the pirate Blind Pew gives him a paper with the Black Spot indicating the time at which his old companions, Cap'n Flint's men, will arrive to kill him and take his chest to discover where the treasure is.

Billy Bones is so afraid of being killed at that very moment by an heart attack. Jim and his mother (his Father died few days before) decide to open the sea-chest to see if they can get any money of the huge amount the old captain owed to the Inn for his stay and at the same time they find the packet with the map.

Time moves fast when you're in danger and the pirates aren't trustworthy people, so it is earlier than indicated on the Black Spot when Jim hears the stick of Blind Pew getting close. They manage to run out of the Inn and hide under a bridge while the angry buccaneers are searching the Admiral Bembow looking for the papers, until the police come and all the pirates run away leaving Blind Pew heading towards the galloping horse that killed him.

Jim now has the perfect excuse to start his journey to adulthood and make his own way in the world; together with Dr Livesey and Sqire Trelawney he joins the crew of the Hispaniola, as cabin boy, in Bristol.

The most peculiar character presented in this novel is Long John Silver; a cunning, sly, one-legged man with a parrot on his shoulder: he is the pirate whom all other buccaneers in popular culture are based on.

But be careful! Even if he is an educated pirate, who can talk like a book, he's always an old sea-dog and he can change sides every time he needs to… this is the reason why adventures and suspense are behind the corner of every page!

I really recommend this book even if sometimes pirate vocabulary makes it obscure and incomprehensible.

Actually, pirate vocabulary is one of the reasons why I decide to pick it up: in my most secret dreams I can see myself leading a pirate battle among my young students.

So I did a little investigation, and here you are!!! Some of the easiest and entertaining pirates' expressions:

Ahoy      
/əˈhɔɪ/ Hello!
Avast!     
/əˈvɑːst/ Hey! Could also be used as "Stop that!" or "Who goes there?"
Aye         
/aɪ/ Yes
Aye Aye!    
Yes Sir! 
Begad!    
/bɪˈgad/ By God! 
Black Spot 
To "place the Black Spot" on another pirate is to sentence him to death, to warn him he is marked for death, or sometimes just to accuse him of a serious crime before other pirates.
Blimey!    
/ ˈblaɪmɪ/ An exclamation of surprise.
Booty       
Loot. Stolen goods. Treasure
Cutlass        
Short sword with a slightly curved blade
Doubloon
/dʌˈbluːn/ Spanish gold coin
Dog            
Bad man
Chart
Map
Gunner          
Sailor who fires the cannons
Eyepatch    
Patch worn to protect an injured eye.
Hands         
Sailors
Hook   
Jolly Roger     
Pirates' flag
Lubber        
/ˈlʌbə/ Land lover, not a sailor, a wimpy person
Maroon        
Abandon on a deserted island, a person who was abandoned
Mutiny         
/ˈmjuːtəni/ When members of a crew or army overthrow their officers
Me         
My
Pieces of Eight 
Spanish silver coin
Seafaring     
/ˈsiːfeərɪŋ/  Working or traveling on the sea
Seaman         
Sailor
Squall    
/skwɔːl/ Storm
Walk the plank 
To be forced to walk off the end of a wooden plank, fall into the sea and drown (a pirate's form of execution)
Vessel    
/ˈvesl/  Ship
Villain    
/ˈvɪlən/ Wicked person or a person guilty of a crime.

I'll leave you the link of this Pirate Song: Talk Like a Pirate for Kids,
and some very interesting activities about the topic: 
Activities about Pirates
Enjoy it!