Week 9: Los pollitos

Los pollitos is a traditional song that many Spanish speakers sung as children. We have learned a lot of the words in this song in previous classes, so the children will likely learn this song pretty easily. The song is:

Los pollitos dicen pío, pío, pío
cuando tienen hambre, cuando tienen frío.
La gallina busca el maíz y el trigo
Les da la comida y les presta abrigo.
Bajo sus dos alas, acurrucaditos,
hasta el otro dia
duermen los pollitos.

Here is one version of the song if you would like to hear it.

There are lots of versions available for download. Even though I usually do not use bilingual materials, we have the Elizabeth Mitchell version at our house. It is a calm, folksy version:


Another fun version is by Juan José Carranza:


The children were given a little chick and a hen to use as we sang the song. You will (hopefully) find this in their bag. You can encourage them to act out the song at home. They will likely be able to tell you what the little chicks (pollitos: poe-YEE-toes) say ("pío, pío, pío.") In class I had a pretend corn cob and any time the children had the chick say pío pío, I let their chick take a "bite" of the corn. You can do this sort of play at home with the stick puppets as well.

In this song, the chicks are hungry (tienen hambre) so we sang the "tengo hambre" song from week 7. The chicks are also cold (tienen frío) and the mother hen gives them a coat (les presta abrigo) so we recycled the weather song and added hace frío (it's cold). Finally, we sang Mami, ¿dónde está mi abrigo? to reinforce the vocabulary for "coat".

It is a joy to work with your children. Today many of them sang along with the songs, and a few even made requests without my prompting. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of their second language development.

Week 8: El tiempo

With the changing of seasons, we have lots of opportunities to experience different types of weather, so today we learned a weather chant that we will do each week to talk about the weather. Your child probably brought home a card with four types of weather on it:

hace sol (AH-seh SOHL): it's sunny [sol is pronounced similarly to the "sole" of your shoe]
está nublado (eh-STAH new-BLAH-doh): it's cloudy
nieva (nee-EH-vah): it's snowing
llueve (yoo-WEH-veh): it's raining

Our chant asks what the weather is like today. Once we have determined what the weather is like, we say the chant again and replace ¿que tiempo hace? with the appropriate weather phrase.

¿Qué tiempo hace afuera, afuera?
¿Qué tiempo hace afuera hoy?

We recycled the Mami, ¿dónde está? song, and today we "looked for" pieces of clothing related to different types of weather:

abrigo (ah-BDEE-goh): coat [pronounce the last syllable similarly to English "go"]
gafas de sol (GAH-fahs deh SOHL): sunglasses
paraguas (pah-DAH-gwas): umbrella