Pollito Tito: ¡El cielo se está cayendo!

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One of the first stories that showed me the power of audible stories in Spanish (with optional translations) was The Spanish Experiment's Pollito Tito. I fell in love with the rhyming and the way it told the familiar children's story in adult language.

I worked with this story for a long time, reading, listening and recording it in my own voice. There was a great deal of vocabulary to learn, so I created image cards for each new word.

Here is a glimpse of the process of building vocabulary, showing the words I harvested from this small story. Of course, everyone will gather different new words from the story, depending on their own current vocabulary. I use Keynote, the Mac equivalent of Powerpoint to make vocabulary cards ... mainly because I think it's fun and engaging.

I try to write a sentence with each vocabulary card to deepen the engagement with that word. Writing the sentence, in Spanish, using the word, reading it out loud, and getting instant feedback from Google Translate as I check both the Spanish and the English versions, creates a powerful learning cycle.