Book review: I want my “sombrero” back

I like to read children’s books to my students that have one word or phrase that is repeated a lot, that way I can read the story in English and just translate one word or phrase into Spanish so that they are hearing it in it’s context, over, and over, and over again.

I Want My Hat Back, by Jon Klassen is a lovely book and perfect for learning a language this way – the children never seem to get tired of listening to it.  With this book the English word “hat” is repeated many times, so I replaced it for the Spanish word “sombrero”.  To encourage the children whenever the word “sombrero” was coming up, I put my hand on my head.  They LOVED saying “sombrero” with me!

The children in one of my younger classes wanted to to do some role play and act out the story for themselves. So, we all choose a character – there are many different animals in this story so everyone could play a different one (if they wanted to). We each made an animal mask which helped us get into character and enjoyed acting out the story each week. The children took it in turns to play different animals too, so everyone got chance to be the “bear” and of course the “rabbit” wearing the red pointy hat! It was fantastic and so lovely to see their language learning come to life!

This was also a fantastic way to introduce new vocabulary as well as recapping colours and the use of “adíos”.

Photo credit: Brandi McGrath Pownall, Eleanor Luica, Dina Kingston-Baird