El Alce Que Tenía Sed

This post is part of a series, 31 Days of Spanish Books for Kids. Please click HERE for the complete list of posts. {Each of these posts contain affiliate links. Thanks for supporting this blog!}

I live in Alaska, and my students are extremely familiar with moose. Occasionally we have them even strolling down our street! So El Alce que Tenía Sed gives us an opportunity to talk about a very familiar animal with my students, but what I really love about this book is the simple, clear language and the humor.

Based on a Native American tale, the story line is really about selfishness and how others react to our self-centered nature. The moose keeps drinking ALL the water in the river even though several of the animals (fish, a muskrat, a beaver) warn him that he is hurting them by taking the water that all should share. Finally, a fly appears on the scene to convince the moose of the error of his ways.

This book would be a great avenue to introduce the tener expressions (tener calor, sed, hambre, etc.) to younger kids as "tener sed" is used repeatedly. Another language teaching point that can be pulled out of the book are various verbs: beber, detener, escuchar, gritar, zumbar. And because of the controlled vocabulary in the book, this is a great story for relatively new readers in Spanish!