Nibi is Water is a beautiful picture book written and illustrated by Joanne Robertson and translated intoAnishinaabeKwe by Shirley Williams and Isadore Toulouse. This book was written for babies and toddlers and is a wonderful resource for preschool and kindergarten world language classes too. By bringing this book to your classes, you are not only sharing the powerful message of protecting water and what nibi (water in AnishinaabeKwe) means for the Ojibwe but also to use it as a tool to provide authentic language input for your students. And the most important thing! Buy the book if you can to support the author. It’s also great when you can add it to your own classroom or school library.
I highly recommend that before engaging with the book to give input to your students, you give some background information about the author. I believe this short clip is great to do so. The clip is obviously in English, but it is important for students to understand why the book was written and help the author spread the message about the connection between water and her culture. Remember that world language classes should be a space not only limited to learning about the culture of the target language you are studying and learning day to day, but to connect with the world as a richly interwoven tapestry of languages, cultures, and traditions. Our classes should be a space to nurture global citizenship!
Some suggestions for using this book:
1. After watching the video with your students, read the book to provide additional context. I added the high frequency word “puedes”. For example:
Page 1: La lluvia es agua.
Page 2: La nieve es agua.
Pages 3 & 4: En el agua puedes chapotear y remar.
Pages 5 & 6: En el agua puedes nadar. Puedes tomar el agua.
Pages 7 & 8: Puedes hacer crecer las plantas o hacer encoger un suéter.
Pages 9 & 10: Con el agua te puedes bañar y cepillar.
Pages 10 & 11: Puedes lavar los platos o bajar (descargar) el baño.
Pages 12 & 13: Puedes salpicar o tomar.
Pages 14 & 15: Puedes darle agua al perro y al gato. Puedes ver al oso en el agua.
Pages 16 & 17: Puedes dar gracias y respetar.
Pages 18 & 19: Puedes dar amor y proteger.
Page 20: Nibi es agua.
Page 21: Nibi es vida. El agua es vida.
I use painter’s tape(Amazon affiliate link) to add text to any book I want to adapt and make it comprehensible for my students. This type of tape sticks to the book without damaging it if you decide to remove the tape in the future.
2. The illustrations are just amazing! Use them to talk about the different animals and colors in the book.
3. Print some pages of the book and use them like movement cards. There are some great illustrations that go well with TPR (Total Physical Response).
The end of this month is fast approaching! There are so many great things that we can do in our classes, but with limited time, especially in the elementary classrooms, we have to choose intentionally.
If you are still deciding what to do, I’m sharing some options with you here. The list includes resources for elementary, middle and high school students! Some of the resources are on my blog and others are available on Teachers Pay Teachers.
This story can be used any time during the school year, however it is a good beginning of year lesson. The story focuses on high-frequency questions and structures such as “¿Cómo te llamas?” and “Me llamo.”
How to Start With This Story?
Start by introducing yourself, for example saying “Hola, me llamo_____”. I suggest you use a name tag with your name and point at it when introducing yourself to the class. Introduce Osito, the main character in the story by saying “Este es Osito. Se llama Osito, yo me llamo (your name)”, model it a few times and ask your students their names by saying “¿Cómo te llamas?” Your students might answer with just their name or using the sentence “Me llamo”. I have shared a few more name activities on my blog. Click HERE to read them.
Before Telling the Story
You can either use the flashcards or props to introduce the characters. These are animals that live in the Andes and the story takes place in Colombia. Use the real pictures to match them to the illustrations so students can see how the real animals look. You may want to show short clips of the animals, but this is optional and can be done before or after telling the story.
Place different flashcards on a table or the floor. Describe one of the flashcards. For example, It’s a big animal, its colors are black and white and it says “moo”. After the description, have one of your students tap or slap the right card using a fly swatter.
What’s missing?
Place 3 to 5 flashcards on a table or on the floor. Look at them with your students and name each of them. Have one of your students close his/her eyes while you hide one of the cards. Have your student open his/her eyes to guess the name of the card that is missing.
The jumping game
Place a line of flashcards on a table or the floor. Call out some of the vocabulary placed on the line and have one of your students jump next to the correct card.
Charades
This is a game of pantomimes. The rules for this game are simple. No words or pointing at anything, just acting it out for other students to guess. Choose one student to act out one of the animals.Have the student act out the animal and give students turns to guess. Whoever guesses first will become the next acting person.
Reverse Charades
Have a student close their eyes. Show a card to the class. The class will show the gesture for the animal. The student has to guess the name of the animal. Give that students two to three turns to guess. I usually help if they are having a hard time guessing. You can decide on the amount of turns or opportunities you give the student to guess.
Simon says
I like playing this game by replacing the name “Simon” with my name or the name of the student leading the game. Assign a sign, gesture or sound for each animal in the story. Have your students make a circle. You (the teacher) or one of the students should be the caller for the game. The caller has to say “______ dice, “Hay un oso” and everyone in class will do the gesture for oso. If someone does something different, then that person will be out.If the caller says “gua, gua, hace el perro” without saying “Simón dice” and someone still does the gesture, then that student will be out of the game. The game continues going until there is one player left. Most of the time I play this game without sending students out. It removes the stress over making mistakes.
Get Ready to Tellor Read the Story
You can project the story or print it to read it aloud to your students. Another idea would be to tell the story just using the props and then project or print the story to read it together.
Class Survey
Ask your students about their favorite animal in the story. Count the results along with your class!
Act It Out
Print out the props and give turns to your students to act out the story. This is a wonderful way to provide repetition.
More Extension Activities
Mini- Book
Have your students color the mini books and take them to share with their families. No scissors are required for this mini-book. Just color and fold!
Name Tags
Have your students fill out and decorate their name tags. Depending on the time of the school year you might to keep them and use them to learn your students’ names and use them during class to give turns or play games!
This is a fun activity that can be used with students in first grade and up! This activity focuses on reviewing or introducing colors, animals, numbers and seasons. This is not an identity activity!
Your students each will need to create their own ¿Quién soy? activity. They will need to fill it out, color, cut and glue.
Once your students have finished the activity, collect their work and use only one student’s work at the beginning of your class. Read the sentences and let the rest of the class guess who it belongs to. I recommend doing one or two students per class to build repetition in a fun way. You will see that your students will ask you for this activity the day you forget to do it!
As World Language educators it is hard to find a single off-the-shelf curriculum that fits the needs of each elementary program. Some programs have less frequent class sessions than others, some are required by their schools (or have the wonderful opportunity) to make strong connections with other subjects, some have more heritage speakers in the student population, and so on! It’s also important to shape a program according to the needs and interests of the community. All this is just to make it clear that I don’t offer a set “one size fits all” curriculum for this reason.
I have shifted to using more stories with my students, but I also supplement them with songs, games, crafts, picture books, holidays, celebrations, culture, cross-curricular connections, clip-chats, and other activities. I don’t teach a unit just focusing on weather, days of the week, months, the alphabet, foods, and so on. I include these topics in our daily routine when we do calendar time. The stories focus on high-frequency vocabulary and expressions as well as vocabulary related to clothing, family members, colors, numbers, and more!
These are some of the stories I use by grade level. It might seem like a lot, but the stories themselves have a lot of repetition and recycle a lot of the same vocabulary. This is also based on the frequency and length of time I see my students. I see my kindergarten students in small groups, once a week for 30 minutes and my 1st through 3rd grade students twice a week for 40 minutes each time. I mostly follow the resources in the order presented and sometimes I recycle stories and use them again the following year to refresh some of the vocabulary and high frequency words.
¡Hola! I am Carolina, a Colombian elementary Spanish teacher based in Boston, MA. Fun for Spanish Teachers is the result of my passion for teaching Spanish to children and my desire to inspire collaboration and creativity in a vibrant teaching and learning community. It’s the perfect stop if you are looking for songs, games, teaching tips, stories, and fun for your classes.
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
