Listen to the Desert/Oye al desierto
In the classroom:
Listen to the Desert / Oye al desierto is
most appropriate for students in kindergarten through first
grades.
It integrates with classroom curriculum in the areas of science (deserts
and animals), language arts (reading and writing onomatopoeia elements
), English as a Second Language (reading and writing onomatopoeia elements),
and social studies (Southwest deserts).
The theme is discovering of the sounds of animals and nature sounds
that may be heard in a desert in the Southwest.
I shared this book with a bilingual kindergarten class who will engage
in a year-long focus on communication in Spanish and English and who
were about to begin a study of the Southwest desert.
This was a collaborative plan between the classroom
teacher, Ms. Carmen Alver, and myself.
Before reading:
- Students examined the illustrations in the book.
After reading:
- Students worked in groups of six children in which they examined
the facts of the sounds which the animals make.
- Students worked individually to reproduce their favorite illustration
in the book.
- These were our prompts: What did the book make you think about?
What did you learn from the story or the illustrations? How did the
book make you feel? Are all the illustrations factual? (Example: a
snake playing the maracas or the iguana that shielded itself with
the cactus.)
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