A trip to the zoo
Title: A trip to the zoo
Focus Age Group: 6 and up
National Standard Goals:
Communication Culture Connections Comparisons Communities
Interpersonal Interpretive Presentational
NJ Cumulative Progress Indicators:
- 7.1.4 Describe people, places, things, and events using short phrases and simple sentences
- 7.1.6 Provide and obtain information on familiar topics
Timeframe: One class period of 30 minutes
Description of Task:
Listen to an audio tape of two children describing animals they saw at the zoo this summer. See if you can guess which animals they saw. Draw pictures of the animals as they are described and write a sentence telling what part of the world that animal might come from.
Es un animal con rayas y le gusta comer carne.
(It is an animal with stripes who likes to eat meat.)
Tiene cuello largo y vive en los Andes.
(It has a long neck and lives in the Andes.)
Es más alta que el elefante, es flaca, y come hojas.
(It is taller than an elephant, it’s thin and eats leaves.)
Es blanco y negro y es hermano del caballo.
(It is white and black and is a brother of the horse.)
Es un pájaro que tiene muchos colores y pico muy largo.
(It is a bird that has lots of colors and a very long beak.)
Es herbívoro y tiene trompa.
(It is herbivorous and has a trunk.)
Come hojas y es blanco y negro.
(It eats leaves and is black and white.)
Vive en el agua y es un caballo muy pequeño.
(It lives in the water and is a very small horse.)
- Worksheet with a box for drawing and a line underneath for the sentence
- Audio tape of two Spanish speaking children (a boy and a girl) describing the 8 animals
The students should have been learning about animals from different countries, their physical characteristics, their habitats, their geographical locations, and their food preferences. Students are being assessed on their listening comprehension skills. This assessment task can be done many times with different descriptions. The task connects to the curriculum in geography and science.
Teacher will use a class list or seating chart and checklist to record student progress.
||correctly identifies all 8 animals
correctly reports the geographical location of the animal in a complete sentence
is creative and careful in both drawing and writing
||correctly identifies at least 5 animals
correctly reports geographical location of the animal
||correctly identifies 3 or less animals
An additional activity could be to have the students come up with their own descriptions in the form of riddles.
They could do pair work describing and guessing.
They could be assigned animals from different Spanish speaking countries to research and report on.
Littlebrook Elementary School
39 Magnolia Lane
Princeton, NJ 08540