Luis y Sof?a Spanish Stories for Primary School Pupils, Level 1: 7 Specially Written Short Stories for Beginning Learners

Children will love reading these humorous Spanish stories, specially written to motivate beginning learners. Written in simple everyday language, these stories are a perfect way of introducing children to Spanish.

These stories have been tried and tested in a range of primary classrooms. Children will love the colour illustrations of Luis and Sofía and their friends and family and be keen to find out what happens to them next. Like most brothers and sisters, Luis and Sofía occasionally bicker.

The language structures and vocabulary in the stories have been carefully chosen so you can be sure that they are appropriate for use with beginning learners. Pupils will be able to use the language they learn in real life conversations. In the Level 1 stories, children are introduced to punctuation in Spanish, different forms of ‘¿cuánto?’ and ‘mucho’, ‘tener’ in the 1st, 2nd and 3rd singular present tense and colours as adjectives.

To help non-specialist teachers, model good pronunciation and provide valuable practice in listening skills, the book comes with free audio downloads and English translations of the stories.

The stories link to topics often taught in primary schools such as common greetings, asking and saying one’s name and age, family members, numbers to 20 and colours, so it is easy to integrate them with all primary Spanish schemes.

My first language was Polish. My Polish parents met in a convalescent home in Brighton, having been invalided out of the Polish Navy during the Second World War. Being bilingual in my early years probably predisposed me to enjoying learning other languages. After graduating in French and Spanish at Southampton University I went on to study German and Italian at evening classes. I love being able to communicate with people in their own language when I travel.Travel is indeed one of my passions. I have been to forty countries so far, often visiting different cities on repeat visits. My ambition is to visit at least one country per alphabet letter - only J, K, O, Q, V, X, Y and Z to go - but I'm going to have trouble getting to Xanadu.I have lived in France since 2015 and being on the mainland of Europe makes travel to many European countries much more accessible. Renovating a 200 year old farmhouse with a lot of land entailed my learning a whole new vocabulary, the first word in my new lexicon being 'une tronçonneuse' (chainsaw). This is understandably not a word I ever needed to teach any of my students in over 20 years of teaching!I worked in banking after graduating and only began my teaching career after the birth of my second child when I started to teach evening classes at a Further Education College. It was an education in itself to be on the other side of the desk for a change! I discovered that I much preferred life in the classroom to commuting to the City and felt I'd belatedly found my true vocation. When my younger child started school I swapped to teaching daytime classes and eventually joined the staff at my son's school but only - to our mutual relief - after he had left!In between working at the FE College and then at my son's school I took a year out to qualify as a Fitness Instructor. Being passionate about exercise I was keen to learn more about the science behind it and gained City and Guilds Diplomas in Anatomy & Physiology, Exercise to Music, Circuit Training and Personal Training. My least favourite element was Exercise to Music - not because I dislike music but because I have so-called 'directional dyslexia'. This led to some embarrassing moments of confusion when I verbally instructed attendees to 'grapevine right' whilst giving vigorous hand-signals to the left. I returned to language teaching soon after...Finally, having very much enjoyed the creative process behind writing my 'Luc et Sophie' books for Brilliant Publications, I am turning my hand to writing adult fiction. I write whenever I get a spare moment from working on my house or in my garden and usually get a lot done on the long car journeys from France to visit family in England. I hasten to add that it's my husband doing the driving and I'm a very quiet passenger! Watch this space for the next big psychological thriller!Barbara Scanes has 12 years of experience teaching French to 4-13 year olds, and prior to this was a secondary French teacher.She gained a huge insight into what children enjoy when learning a foreign language and has put this knowledge and expertise into play in writing ʻLuc et Sophieʼ.

According to my partner, I can sleep-talk in both English and Spanish. A talent our children now share: the language they are sleep-talking in determines which one of us gets up to go and see them!As a teenager, I played the flute in France and Italy with the youth orchestra I was part of. We had so much fun and I have so much respect for the adults who took responsibility for us all before the days of mobiles. I can't imagine anything more stressful! In an Italian town called Soave, they made us all chocolate pizza to have after the concerts - it was amazing!I visited Vancouver and the highlight was going on a bear-spotting trip. We could get out and see brown bears (from a safe distance!) in their natural habitat. It was amazing, and seeing a bear cub frolic down by a river was just incredible.On my year abroad in Spain I worked as a language assistant in a Primary School. Year 6 had a school trip to a local indoor ski slope and I was invited along to help out. Having never skied before, I thought it would be fun to try, but ended up zooming down the slope backwards in front of all the children as the headteacher frantically tried to catch me before I did myself, or someone else, an injury.I am a genuine linguaphile and love reading books and listening to podcasts about languages. I was delighted to have one of my questions read out on "Something Rhymes with Purple" (a podcast about the etymology of words) and made all of my family members listen to the response. In case you were wondering, I asked why the Spanish, English, French, German and Italian words for "butterfly" are so different - the response was very interesting. I also couldn't wait to go to the British Museum exhibition about the Rosetta Stone.Jenny Bell has a first-class Spanish degree and has been teaching Spanish in primary schools for 8 years.Knowing how children loved learning with Luc et Sophie, Jenny has used her expertise to create a Spanish version of the story-based scheme of work for us - Learn Spanish with Luis y Sofía.Following on from this successful conversion of one of our schemes into another language, Jenny then tackled producing Physical Spanish Phonics (based on our much loved Physical French Phonics resource).