Backwards Planning: Brandon Brown

Last year my fourth graders read Brandon Brown quiere un perro by Carol Gaab. This book is excellent for beginners--while the total word count is 4400, the unique word count is just 100. I know what you are thinking, and trust me I was thinking the same thing last year. How could a book with only 100 unique words be interesting? I don't know how Carol does it, but the book is both captivating and relatable. 

Although my students did a great job reading the book, I was not completely prepared to teach it to them. I waited too late in the year to start reading and ended up in a race to finish the book before the end of the school year. This year will be different! I am going to start reading the book earlier in the year and pre-teach more of the vocabulary. My plan is to start reading the book with my third and fourth graders after spring break, and until then I am backwards planning from the book. To do this I looked at the teacher's guide which breaks down each chapter into new vocabulary and cognates (this guide is a must have if you are teaching this book- it is full of great activities and assessments). My first step for backwards planning was taking the words that were new to my students and grouping them together into stories. The plan is for the students to have seen the new vocabulary structures before they start reading the book. 

A colleague and I grouped the following structures together:

• tiene ___ años 
• va a cumplir
• hace/hizo. 
  
  

I began by using Personalized Questions and Answers (PQA) with my students. We discussed how old they were and what age they were going to turn on their next birthday. When I asked students how old I was I got guesses as young as 19 to as old as 56! Next I put up pictures of famous people and I gave three options for how old they were (tiene ___ años) and the students tried to guess correctly.

Next, I picked a student who had a birthday coming up and asked them what they wanted their classmates to make them for their birthday. I put prewritten statements into the Caja mágica and had the students read them to the birthday boy. For example: La clase hace un sándwich de espárrago para tu cumpleaños. La clase hace una sopa de ojos para tu cumpleaños. La clase hace una pizza de cucarachas para tu cumpleaños. The birthday boy would then respond with "¡Qué asco!" My students were excited to see what idea would come out of the box next, which provided me with a compelling way to circle the word hace.

During the next class period I read a book that I created on Storybird  (I was inspired by Cynthia Hitz's blog post about using Storybird and by all of the different artwork on the Storybird site). The only issue I had with Storybird was that when I tried to make my story public I received a message stating that stories written in languages other than English cannot be made public. It looks like the link is working now, but feel free to comment or email me if you have any issues. Read the story "Un cumpleaños terrible" here. 

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Extensions

• Sticky note game: After reading the book as a class, play the Sticky Note game (thanks for the idea, Karen Rowan). Have two students sit across from each other at a table and place a pencil between them. The teacher orally reads statements about what happened in the story. If the statement is true then the first student to grab the pencil uses it to give themselves a point on their sticky note. If the statement is false and a student grabs the pencil then they take a point away from themselves. Students also have to negotiate what happens when they grab the pencil at the same time. This is an exciting way to both check for student comprehension and give students more repetitions of target structures. 
  
• Write a new ending: Break students into small groups and give them a different picture from Storybird. Each group can write a new ending inspired by their picture and read it to the class. Have the class vote on the most creative, the most bizarre, and the cutest endings.