I first got to know the work of Elise Gravel when I came across Monstres en vrac in Montréal ten years ago. When I was in California last week, I popped into a branch of Barnes & Noble to have a look at their Spanish section. Considering how bilingual California is, it was a smaller section than I expected. I purchased one book: El rosa, el azul y tú by Elise Gravel. It's also available in French as Le rose, le bleu et toi !
The book offers us opportunities to discuss self, relationships and gender stereotypes with children, while also covering areas of language such as nouns and their gender, opinions, and adjectives and adjectival agreement.
For examples, here are some nouns which we could show to children without the images. They could investigate the phonics and use their dictionaries to find the meanings. They could also work out the grammatical gender of each noun. Then, as is suggested at the top of the page, we could ask the children to sort them into "Things for girls", "Things for boys" and "Things for everyone". The resulting discussions will have strong links to the PSHE/RSE curricula.
Another example is opinions, which can be approached as a true/false activity as suggested on the page.
Elise Gravel also offers some free posters on her website. Among them there are two useful Spanish ones:
This book and these resources give an interesting twist to commonly taught grammar, and would give Key Stage 3 teachers a way of doing the usual in an unusual way for their new Year 7 students who have different experiences of language learning.
I would recommend speaking to your headteacher and/or PSHE coordinator before using these ideas in your lessons.
That's a fantastic find! Elise Gravel's books are so unique and engaging. It's great to see how her work can promote important discussions about gender identity and expression. Thanks for sharing this book recommendation.
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