En Aquel Prado

This week in Spanish for Preschooler we read "En Aquel Prado" a fun animal counting story based on a poem by Olive Wadsworth (Over in the Meadow).  I love this book because it was so well translated, keeping the general meaning and storyline of the English version but with flow and rhyme that worked great in Spanish.  Since most of the Spanish-language material we get to read is a translation from English it's nice to get a good one.

So for class I printed up all of the animals in the book, cut them out and for the first class taped them up around the room.  As we read each page I had the kids find the animals on that page.  I put them on a white board meadow that Chiquitita had drawn for us and we had to count to make sure they'd found ALL of them (nine ducks is a lot of ducks).  This was a great way to get all the kids involved (especially the busy ones that have trouble paying attention to stories) and it was a great way to gauge their comprehension.  Chiquita knew which one was a buho (owl) and which was a lagartija (baby lizard) but she did get caught up in the spirit of it and brought me most of the castores (beavers) before their turn in the story.

Because this way of telling the story takes a while it actually took up almost our whole class the first time.  The next day I told the story with all the animals already on the white board and we practiced an action or sound for each one.  Then we modified "Venga a Ver Mi Chacra" (one of Chiquita's favorite songs, she knows ALL the farm animal sounds) to "Venga a Ver El Prado" and went through the animals from the book doing the action or sound we had practiced.

Both days we ended with a coloring page (download and print here) of all the animals (in the correct numbers, yes I am a clip art genius) in the meadow.