The National K-12 Foreign Language Resource Center offers an excellent standards-based thematic unit based on Cuadros de la Familia / Family Pictures by Carmen Lomas Garza that I have used to review/teach/reinforce/enrich about family members, clothing, colors, fruits, and parts of a home and lots of Mexican & Mexican-American culture topics with my fifth graders. See this link to purchase the thematic unit:
This book is available also in big book format. See links for ordering info:
The companion book by Carmen Lomas Garza called En mi familia which explores other cultural situations is nice for enrichment purposes.
We review necessary vocabulary they already have been exposed to, and I then teach the necessary vocabulary to describe each picture adequately with a magic box -- la caja mágica. Eventually, we work up to writing short language experience stories about selected pictures by my using the question words quién, qué, dónde, cuándo. The pictures are also excellent to teach izquierda, derecha, en el centro, cerca de, lejos de.
The beauty of these two books is that the characters remain the same and the children are able to build on each language experience and so expand their skills with the next picture because they are familiar with the family members, the author and illustrator, and the setting. I place the children in pairs as I read aloud the text, and the children follow along with their fingers. They repeat each sentence after me. Then we make a list of
words we already know and any cognates. Then I solicit information about the main
message or gist of the text to add to the language experience story. I also find a simple phrase or sentence or two in each "story" to teach a grammatical point indirectly.
Online text for book now available at
