Keep the readings playful

Ratón is a playful and joyful little mouse. Encourage and enjoy everyones’ ideas, and trust your instincts on where the readings or activities might take you. It’s ok to wander off a bit.

Give students time

Give students time to react to each picture, allow them to wonder about Ratón and to venture ideas about the meaning of the text.

Entertain students’ questions

Think about these books as interactive readings, where reader responses are encouraged and understood as a basis of their engagement with the text. When possible, use questions as springboards to further interactions in Spanish. There will be many questions, especially in the beginning, when students are just getting familiarized with Ratón. Check out the FAQ’s HERE (LINK).

Acknowledge different opinions to further conversation

Listen closely to differences in opinions and if possible, make them part of the conversation.  

Use Spanish as much as possible

Speak in Spanish, unless one’s native language is needed to support comprehension or to discuss cultural concepts. For example, the picture of the luchador (wrestler) in book # 1 can elicit a discussion of cross-cultural aspects and in this case, one’s native language might be more appropriate.

Teach students strategies for when they encounter words or phrases they are unfamiliar with

• Consider the context: Is there something in the images and/or the gestures the teacher uses while reading that might offer clues on the meaning of the text?

• Look at the writing and listen to how words sound: the way a word is written and their sound when read out loud can sometimes be helpful, especially if they share cognates with words in one’s native language.

• Teach and remind them to ask: ¿Qué es ___? (What is ___?) or ¿Cómo se dice ___ en inglés? (How do you say __ in English?)

¡Y colorín, colorado, este cuento se ha acabado!

All books end with this popular rhyming phrase that is used in many Spanish-speaking countries. It indicates that the book has ended. The first part of the phrase (Y colorín, colorado) makes reference to the color red but doesn’t mean much, except that it rhymes with the second part (este cuento se ha acabado), which means that the story has ended. As a whole, the phrase is just a playful way to say “The end.” With time, students will likely start saying the phrase themselves at the end of any reading in Spanish.

Work on follow-up activities and encourage students to practice speaking skills

Follow-up activities are a combination of showing one’s understanding of a story, predicting something about Ratón in preparation for an upcoming book, or other activities related to particular books. Choose one or more to work on, according to classroom characteristics.

Consider encouraging students in lower grades to initially spell the words out based on their sound, instead of necessarily writing the correct spelling for them. Since Spanish is a very transparent language in terms of its grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences, students can have fun trying to map sounds to words, especially if they are slowly made aware of specific correspondences that might facilitate reading and writing. For example, the fact that the letter “e” always sounds [e] regardless of its placement or other letters surrounding it.