During the fall of 1996, the teachers piloted their units in their own classrooms after which final revisions were made, and the units were edited and published by the National K-12 Foreign Language Resource Center. Crictor, the main character of the story, arrives in a package delivered by the mail carrier. Madame Bodot, his new owner, is an elementary school teacher in a small village in France. The story unfolds as the village confronts a crisis and Crictor saves the day with his unusual talents, and is honored as a hero for his bravery. This unit links language, content and culture as it introduces students to an entertaining story about boa constrictors and life in French villages of the past.
Lessons integrate comptines , poems, and rap to offer students engaging activities.
Incorporating many of the national student standards for foreign language learning, this unit links Crictor with learning experiences in French that reinforce the content areas of math, language arts, and science. We invite you to take your students into the France of yesterday to visit a typical village and to experience an adventure with Tomi Ungerer's Crictor . In Cuadros de familia , Carmen Lomas Garza takes us on a journey through the life of an extended Mexican-American family in a Texas town on the Mexican border. We participate in their everyday activities, their celebrations, their occupations, and their dreams. The unit based on this book integrates languages, content, and culture in lessons where students actively participate in learning language as they hear and interact with the vivid images in Lomas Garza's paintings.