June's Book of the Month & Complimentary Bilingual Activity

Playing Lotería/El juego de la loteríaby René Colato Laínez
Illustrated by Jill Arena

The LBBC’s recommendation for June’s Libro del Mes, is René Colato Lainez’s Playing Lotería/El juego de la lotería.

Aurora reviewed this great book back in October last year, and she also interviewed René about it. I had not had the opportunity to read it until recently when I was so pleasantly surprised to find it at our local library. You can read Aurora’s review and interview here, but I wanted to add a few things and explain why we’ve made it our Libro del Mes. First, the story is engaging for children and something that they can relate to. Lotería focuses on the relationship between a child and his grandmother, and on how they become closer as each one teaches the other a new language, in this case, through the use of the lotería game. The storyline is fun and teaches the reader how to play the game.

The first time we read it, my daughter said she wanted to play the game at home. I started to go on-line to buy the lotería, but then realized this would be a great activity to incorporate in our summer bilingual fun activities.

So what I did was put together a simple table on a piece of paper in the same format as the lotería game boards. Then, I went ahead and labeled each box, but families could leave them blank if they prefer and just have your children draw whatever they want in each one then go back and label them. Since this was their first time creating the boards, I thought it might help my daughter to have a little more direction. Then I had her draw a picture in each box of the item listed.

Once she’s done, I made a color copy onto cardstock paper and then cut out the squares…Voila! You have your own little lotería game! We were out of frijoles, so we used buttons instead. Since we didn’t have a wire cage, I shuffled the "cards" and then put them in a little pile from which I pulled the top card. I made up silly phrases to go with each one. Here's what the final version looked like:

My kids had a blast and instead of making them fill the whole board, I just made them fill a row. Also, since my son is too little to draw yet, I had my daughter do a second board that was slightly different both in sequence and in items listed. If your children are too young to draw, but old enough to find the different pictures, you can draw them in yourself.

Or you can download our free printables here. Please note, however, that all the images are copyright, but are free for your personal use.

I’ve gone ahead and made several different versions (a blank game board, a labeled game board, and one complete with images,) so you can choose the one that best suits your needs. I've also included the simple directions for how to play the game on the introductory page. I hope you all enjoy this little activity this summer! Send us your pictures and we’ll post them!

And if you would like to buy your own copy of Playing Lotería, please click here. Or you can follow the link in our sidebar to the LBBC’s on-line store. We have both new and gently used copies available.