Pre-Reading Activities:
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Cover—
The cover is a collage of three groups of images.
-What are they?
-How do these images work together?
-What kind of animal makes up the face of the sun?
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Book Title—
-How do the title and the cover image work together?
-Why might the title be in English and Spanish?
-What might it mean to be Under an Ocelot Sun?
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Skim/Information Gathering—
-Skim the book, looking at the illustrations, and the text.
-What did you notice?
-What did you wonder?
-What do you think this book is about?
-Did the bilingual title indicate something about the book?
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Geographical Location—​
-On the last page of the book, after the glossary, there is a map.
What is that big red country? Is it in North America or Central America?
-Look at a map of North America and Central America.
Make a list of the countries of Central America and their capital cities.
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Vocabulary—
-Find the glossary at the back of the book, look through it, and pay special attention to these words.
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-What do Abuela and mija mean.
I called my abuela, Ita, short for abuelita. Do you have a special name for your abuela?
Do your parents, grandparents, and loved ones have a term of endearment for you?
-What is an ocelot?
-Find a picture of an ocelot and also a picture of a jaguar (the animal, not the car).
-What are some stories that you know of that use animals in special ways?
-The word jaguar comes from the Tupi language, one of the many native languages spoken by indigenous people in Brazil. The word ocelot comes from the Nahua language, one of the many languages spoken by indigenous people in Mexico. In their original language, these words refer to the same animal, the Panthera onca, the largest of the spotted cats in the Americas.
-Tegucigalpa/Téguz.
-The capital of Honduras is Tegucigalpa. People who study the origin of names do not agree on what Tegucigalpa means, but many think that it is originally from the Nahau language. While the center of Nahua culture was not in the mountains of Honduras, in the time before the arrival of Europeans what is Honduras today would have been under the influence of the Aztec empire—the people we call Aztecs were Nahua. Also, the Pipil people from El Salvador and the western part of Honduras are part of the Nahua people group. They migrated from Central Mexico to El Salvador and Honduras around 900 C.E.
-Téguz is a shortened form of Tegucigalpa. It is similar to how we refer to the District of Columbia as D.C. Do you know other nicknames for cities?
-What is a treasure? How do we treat treasures?
