Thursday, April 7, 2011

Raton Perez

The loose that tooth story has been a big hit with the class this week. The students have their own copy of the book and I think that they enjoy having their own little book to work out of more than using stories from the textbook from day to day. The story plays with words a bit and it was a challenge to describe the jokes to the class in a way that they would be able to understand the context. Also, the play on words served as a nice platform for teaching new words. The tooth un-fairy was one of the titles of a chapter and this generated a lot of discussion. I needed to explain what the tooth fairy was to the students because here in Argentina they do not have the tooth fairy, they have a mouse named Perez. This required translation of the word fairy, along with a description of the common tooth fairy. Once this concept was concrete I proceeded to describe the use of the word fair and held a discussion about what is fair and unfair. Once I was sure that all the students were with me about the difference between fair and unfair, and the cultural difference between the tooth fairy and “Raton Perez” I was able to show that the name of this chapter was a play on words, and not surprisingly, only a handful of the students were able to share this humor. This wordplay was a fun opportunity for a minilesson about fair and unfair and was a lesson that I will always remember because of my newfound knowledge of the Argentine, Raton Perez.

No comments:

Post a Comment