Chapter 3 is one of my favorites in El Nuevo Houdini because there are so many great resources in the Teacher’s Guide that supplement the text! Here are my plans:

  1. We did a modified version of the pre-reading activity about cars and driving. I re-formatted the worksheet included so that it would be a “Find Someone Who” (Buscagente) instead of an individual activity. This allowed us to review the verb “conducir” and gave me the opportunity to introduce vehicle vocabulary (camión/camioneta, motocicleta/moto, etc.) in Spanish.
  2. We viewed and discussed the Spanish cars slideshow from the Teacher’s Guide so that we could further amplify our vehicle vocabulary.
  3. I read aloud the chapter to the students. I’ve discovered that I like this best, and my students prefer it as well. Because I add in emotion as I am reading, my students engage with the text better and have better comprehension the first time around.
  4. I skipped the tableau activity from the guide simply because of the group of students that I’m reading this book with at this time. It would have been too chaotic to be purposeful.
  5. Students read the chapter individually, a second time, and responded to the comprehension questions. Then, we reviewed them as a class.
  6. We did the “Good vs. Bad” activity. Last year, I made a reusable set of posters and laminated quotes, and the kids used the sets completed the activity in groups of four.
  7. Students did the friend/self Venn Diagram comparison as a pre-writing activity, and then I had them write it out in paragraph form as a writing assessment on this form (rubric embedded).
  8. We watched the Low Riders video and did the reading from the guide, followed by a discussion.

Another reading that works well with this chapter (perhaps as a sub plan…that’s what I used it for this time around!) is Mimos en Caracas.

I received express, written consent from the publisher to share the materials that I created for this novel in this blog post. I am not compensated in any way by the author or publisher for writing this post.

More resources for teaching El nuevo Houdini

Pre-reading: Houdini Rope Escape

Using novels in class:

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