Paint and Pages

I teach in a community blessed with diversity! Many of my students have connections to Mexican culture, so when I saw the book, “Paletero Man” I knew I had to add it to my collection and share it with my students. I spent my entire classroom budget adding diverse books to my classroom library this year and it has been wonderful! So wonderful that I’ve added a few make-believe classroom budgets worth of diverse books as well. 😉

My paraprofessional Lucy is a fluent English and Spanish speaker. She wants to be a teacher one day. I asked her to read the Spanish portion of the book aloud and she did! The students were very engaged during her Spanish read aloud.

We incorporated Paletero Man into our dramatic play. We turned our puppet stand into a paleta stand! I laminated used paint-samples popsicles as paletas and printed menus I found online. We added a cash register and I showed students the different roles they could pretend: seller, cashier, or customer. A student pulled a chair from our library area over to the Paletero stand so we added a couple chairs for an outdoor seating area. So much fun!

I wanted to have a special treat and give each of my students a paleta. Unfortunately, they are quite expensive! So we decided to make our own. I bought some apple juice for myself and my team and we made apple juice ice cubes for snack. They were tasty!