As a part of the curriculum that I go through with my students in years 1-3 (which is mostly material from SOMOS 1) I have added a few novels that I like to go through with students. Here are my favs and when I use them.
#1: Selena
I. <3. Selena.
The student reader and the person.
I have used this book in Spanish III (the intermediate version; the book comes with a novice and intermediate version). So this is after I have done Somos 1 Units 1-12, and then skipped around through some of 15-20. I have also at this point taught Brandon Brown Hace Trampa and done some explicit verb tense instruction.
Students love learning a true story about a real singer. Many of my students have fallen in love with her just like I did. For me personally, this is my favorite novel to teach.
Reasons I love this story:
The storyline is great. My students love the forbidden romance of Chris and Selena, the drama, all of it.
It's written so well. The vocabulary is extremely repetitive to give students the best shot at internalizing new words and structures.
If students aren't drawn in by the storyline, they may be drawn in by the music! This book lends itself to listening to her music.
The supplementary teacher guide is great and comes with a ton of opportunities for students to further practice vocabulary and a number of supplementary readings, activities, and games.
(Note: I was looking for the teacher guide that I purchased 3-4 years ago, this is the only thing that I could find. There's a description that includes all of the supplementary activities that I got in my teacher guide when I purchased it, but I don't know if that's different than the teachers "flex." I know Wayside recently bought out Fluency Matters so things could have changed there).
Tips and tricks:
I create a college basketball brackets style showdown for students to choose with Selena songs they best like. I also have a number of them as CLOZE activities for students to listen to. Some of them are available on TPT here. We listen to two of them each day and students have to choose which one they like better.
#2: Brandon Brown Hace Trampa
I teach Brandon Brown Hace Trampa after teaching SOMOS 1 Units 1-12. After 1-12 (including some of the supplementary units), I take a week or two and do some basic past tense stories to introduce students to the third-person endings. My students get exposed to first and second person preterite tenses almost every Monday with weekend chats. Basically every Monday, the first thing we do in class is take turns sharing a little bit about what we did over the weekend. They get some basic exposure to first person preterite this way.
This past year I realized that in years past I haven't done a sufficient job of introducing the preterite and imperfect to students before jumping into Brandon Brown Hace Trampa (which I teach my students the past tense version of). So this year I took some of our stories and re-wrote them in the preterite. I gave them to students and ask them to see what patterns they could see with different verbs and how they ended compared to their present counterparts.