Whew! My school year is over, my room is packed and now- I just have to pack up my house, have an edcamp, move, vacation and make it through June! At least those are all- relatively- fun things! In my head, I wasn’t going to blog much in June, but then I started to feel the itch.
Two weeks ago, I got to visit my new school and talk to the current foreign language department about curriculum and novels. And of course, my head started spinning with ideas. I also wanted to be purposeful about the novels that we chose to implement next year. Next year, I will be teaching: Early Childhood and grades 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8. The younger classes meet twice a week and the middle school classes meet 4 times a week. The department decided to introduce novels in fourth grade which to me seems reasonable.
When you are first starting to look at novels, I suggest thinking about the difficulty level. Martina wrote a wonderful series about how to know if a novel is appropriate for each level that I highly recommend!
First, I looked at what the school already had. I really liked two of the novels they were already using. They had Brandon Brown versus Yucatan for sixth grade. I hadn’t read it before, but when I did, I liked the incorporation of Mexican culture. I can’t wait to Google Map those locations a la Maestra Loca! Also, they had Isabela captura un congo. When I taught elementary classes before, I loved to incorporate animals. This story does so nicely, and I can use some of my resources from Robo en la noche with Costa Rica.
Second, I decided that I wanted to vary the countries that the books emphasize. One year, I fell into the trap of emphasizing too much one country when I wasn’t analyzing this. My colleague emailed and said the exact same thing! I looked at the current novels and then added on other novels that I knew would cover various countries. Spanish teachers in particular are so lucky that there are so many books to choose from! If it hasn’t happened already, soon I predict that there will be a novel from each country.
Finally, I have found that students prefer a balance of non-fiction and fiction. Since I have tried to cover two novels a year, I try to choose one of each. While a few years ago, there were mostly fiction books, now there is a wide variety of both fiction and non fiction. When I polled my students what books they preferred at the end of the year, they were split because I believe I finally struck a nice balance. (Last year, I taught Vidas Impactantes with level 5 along with Calaca Alegre. In level 3, we read Robo en la noche and Santana.)
So after debating this, what did I decide on?
- Grade 4: Edi el elefante (based on recommendations from many!)
- Grade 5: Isabela captura un congo
- Grade 6: Brandon Brown versus Yucatan and Felipe Alou (I have always wanted to teach it! And it is a non-fiction book!)
- My colleague is planning on teaching Escape cubano, Esperanza and maybe even El Ekeko in 7th grade.
- Grade 8: Bianca Nieves because we loved it so much two years ago and Leyendas impactantes (I chose Leyendas because I want to start with a study of Venezuela. Also- it has a novice and intermediate version!)
Many of these books will be new to us- so I would love any suggestions that you have! Also, how do you decide on books that you use for whole class novels?
Maris Hawkins 
Thanksfor the post. How do you do the whole class novels? How long do you take in a class and about how long in the year does it last to read and work through a novel?
If you check out the home page, I have written a few posts that lay out the day to day activities that I do with these novels. I try to keep my novels to a month which gives me enough time to do extension activities, assess students and keeps the pace fast enough to keep students engaged.