Category: nonfiction

This book is amazing! It has flaps, dials, double page factfiles, stories, quizzes, jokes and puzzles, all teaching facts about our planet – Planète Terre. In fact, it’s so amazing that I couldn’t just take photos, I had to make a video!

It’s the kind of book that would go down well on the class bookshelf for children to access in their free reading time. The facts are short and therefore less threatening than in your average non fiction book, allowing learners to concentrate on decoding a few unfamiliar words using their knowledge of cognates and other languages as well as context and of course their existing geographical/scientific knowledge. And although Spanish is the language we learn at my schools, I would still put this on the bookshelf as children like variety, some go to French club and others just enjoy looking at texts in other languages.

If you wanted to guide children’s reading of the book, you could compile a list of words in English that could be written in French by looking in the book (there are many words written in bold that would suit this activity) or perhaps create some sentences with gaps to be completed by reading a certain page, or even pose the six questions below and ask more advanced learners to answer in a sentence or two.

I’m off to find more of these – in Spanish this time!

Following on from my last post about a couple of non-fiction books I bought in Bilbao, I’ve decided to share some other non-fiction texts that I’ve collected over time. In fact, I’ve concluded that I need to do it in several posts as there are quite a few, so here is part one which includes some ‘arty’ books! By arty I mean to do with the arts not just about artists although there are quite a few that fit that category.

Don Quijote – A Spanish Language Primer

I bought this lovely board book last year to share as part of the celebrations of the 400th anniversary of his death- and that of Shakespeare. It is essentially a word book with the left page in English and the right hand page in Spanish and intended for very young children; however, used in conjunction with this song from BBC Bitesize ClassClips, it gave a stimulus to introduce and discuss the most famous work of Cervantes in a simple and unthreatening way.

Link to purchase: Amazon

ISBN – 978-1-4236-3875-9

Gaudí

This book forms part of a series called Big Names for Small People and my copy is in English although you can buy it in Catalan  (and soon in Spanish – see the link below) I am a great fan of Gaudí and his story is so interesting that I really enjoy sharing this book with young learners porque si as well as in the context of our learning about Gaudí’s artwork when we discuss shape and colour. It’s also particularly useful for looking at timelines, chronology and working out how long ago things happened.

Link to purchase in Spanish: Amazon    Cossetània Edicions for the other books in the series

ISBN – 978-84-9034-414-9

It contains no words, but I also use Trencadís  with the above book. It’s a wonderful sticker book with outlines that you fill in with stickers that are taken from photographs of Gaudí’s original works so children get to be just like Gaudí without the mess of smashed crockery!

ISBN – 978-84-616-3706-5

And finally, before we leave Barcelona, here’s a storybook in English that gives a flavour of the city through the eyes of two dogs called Poppy and Max. Poppy and Max – Holidays in Barcelona is a work of fiction but I thought I’d share it here as it’s in context!

ISBN – 978-84-92745-31-9

Frida Kahlo (Colección Antiprincesas #1)

My final book (for now as I have more at school that I’d like to share!) belongs to a series that has attracted lots of attention and centre round the life and work of Frida Kahlo. It’s completely in Spanish and whilst the chunks are fairly short, it’s not the sort of book that you could expect children to pick up and understand without guidance. I like the small blue boxes that give definitions of key words like surrealismo and revolución, and also the stylised drawings of some of Frida’s works alongside photographs and pictures of her actual work. A fascinating woman!

Below is a video of the book being read in English, and you can see it in Spanish by following this link  and forwarding to about 12 minutes. The link that promises a lesson plan based around the book is broken but I’ve tracked it down to here – it includes some excellent ideas not just based around the book but also around promoting women and being ‘antiprincesas’.

ISBN – 978-987-33-9158-3

I hope this selection of books has been of interest. I’ll share more in my next post, focusing on books with a scientific theme.

Continuing on my posts about books I bought in Bilbao, we come to a couple of non-fiction texts that I bought at the Día del Libro market.  I was drawn to them as they are colourful, very visual and were also very reasonably priced at €5 (always a consideration when I’m buying several!) Non-fiction texts are less readily available than storybooks and it can be tricky to find ones that are appealing as well as accessible to primary school learners. So I was really pleased to find these. There are four in the series Aula del Saber and I selected these two as I already have books about the planets, and dinosaurs is a topic that y1 cover.

Firstly Curiosidades del Cuerpo Humano, chosen as it supports the Science curriculum as well as containing pages that will be useful for Health Week.  For example, this page will be useful to Y1 who are looking at dental health in Health Week as well as Y4 who look at what happens to our teeth, completing experiments using egg shells and Coca Cola!

Y5 are looking at life cycles and human reproduction so the page above would be interesting. As you can see, even without knowing much Spanish you can understand that the table shows the gestation times of various animals. There are several pages that outline the whole process of reproduction including the female and male reproductive system so it’s perhaps not one to put in the school library but rather a resource to be used in context.

I like that the information is on bite size chunks and that there are lots of diagrams and images to support understanding. This section would be good for finding cognates.

And the second book is Insólitos Animales which has a similar mixture of short texts, diagrams, tables of information and Did you know..? sections.

I’ve selected a few pages that drew my attention.

This one could be the stimulus for a sorting activity, giving learners a list of animals to classify into groups and create simple sentences e.g. Una ballena es un mamífero. Una rana es un anfibio.

Here’s an idea of what a double page spread looks like:

Some interesting vocabulary in the tables below; learners could follow the model and complete for other animals. The short texts could be used for a ‘Find the word for…’ activities as well as simple comprehensions that guide the learner through the text, calling on their existing knowledge of elephants/frogs as well as their linguistic knowledge to respond.

Y4 will finish their unit on animals before the end of term so I think we’ll have a look at this book together! And I’ll let you know any further ideas we have to use it.

In my next post I’ll share some other non fiction texts that I have collected. In the mean time, here are some other of my posts on a similar subject that might interest you:

Muy Interesante Junior

ColoradoLibraries (the West Sussex link no longer works but there are some resources here that are based around animals and their habitats)

¿De dónde viene el yak? my own non fiction text written using Storybird.