La lucha de la limonada: The Prequel to ¿Puedo ir al baño?

Watch ¿Puedo ir al baño? →

When Justin sang ¿Puedo ir al baño? to his teacher, most people assumed it was simply the relatable tale of a student desperately needing to use the bathroom.

But there was a story nobody knew.

La lucha de la limonada is the graphic novel prequel to ¿Puedo ir al baño?, Señor Wooly’s most well-known music video. It reveals what happened to Justin before he ever raised his hand and, most importantly, why he needed to go to the bathroom so badly.

And somehow, it involves lemonade.

The prequel absolutely nobody asked for

La lucha de la limonada tells the story of what happened to Justin before the events of ¿Puedo ir al baño?.

At only 20 pages, it’s a very quick read. The language is simple and repetitive, the illustrations provide tons of context, and every page includes a Spanish-to-English glossary.

But when we first published the book, the story itself wasn’t actually the experimental part.

One story. Four proficiency levels.

At the time, we had already rewritten our digital graphic novels at four different proficiency levels. Teachers kept asking us to print those different versions, too.

There was a reason we hadn’t. Printing four separate editions of every book is kind of a logistical nightmare.

But La lucha de la limonada was short enough that we decided to try something a little ridiculous: we printed the same graphic novel at four different proficiency levels.

Novice Low. Novice Mid. Novice High. Intermediate Low. Same characters. Same story. But the language was rewritten for the needs of different readers.

Would we eventually do this with every graphic novel? No. Maybe? Probably not. Definitely not. We’ll see.

We didn’t just swap out vocabulary

The four editions tell the same overarching story, but we didn’t create the upper levels by simply replacing easy words with harder ones.

We actually changed what the characters say. As the proficiency level increases, the dialogue can become more natural, textured, and detailed while the story itself stays the same.

LEVEL 1 · NOVICE LOW

LEVEL 4 · INTERMEDIATE LOW

“I am blown away...again. The content you produce is STELLAR. I bought all four levels because I was excited to see the difference between the levels. The language differences are terrific. The story is AWESOME. I forgot as I was reading that it was a prequel, so the last page (which connects the novel and the song) was a bomb dropping. So funny! I laughed out loud multiple times.

I really don't know how you manage to impress and surprise so consistently. Every. Single. Time. Thank you and the whole team for this IMPRESSIVE novel!”

Lynn Heil
Spanish Teacher

How does La lucha de la limonada connect to ¿Puedo ir al baño?

La lucha de la limonada works as its own story, but it was written specifically as the prequel to ¿Puedo ir al baño?. The final panel lands better if students already know the original video, because that’s the moment when the two stories snap together.

My preferred order is to show students ¿Puedo ir al baño? first. Then go backward and let them discover what happened to Justin before he ever raised his hand.

The book also deliberately reuses language from the original video, so the connection runs through more than just the plot.

And now there are lesson plans, too

Years after we first published La lucha de la limonada, we went back and built a complete 3-day lesson plan around it. We also completely redesigned the 5-day lesson plan for ¿Puedo ir al baño?.

Teach them together and you’ve got an 8-day connected unit built around one increasingly urgent bathroom emergency.

I wrote a separate post showing exactly how the two lesson plans fit together, including some of the activities students will complete along the way.

Choose your version

The same 20-page story is available in four separate print editions. Choose the proficiency level that fits your students.