Chapter 6: Traditional Literature

Traditional Literature has always captured my eyes especially Fairy Tales which seem to be a staple within the society we live today. Cinderella, The Little Mermaid and Mulan are all fairy tales that have been retold by Disney but also there are variants of the story all around the globe. When I lived overseas for a few years I was privy to a variant of the transformation stories told all over the world. This one was about a young girl named Sirena and because she loved to swim so much and disobey her mother’s wishes she was turned into a mermaid. I loved this story when I lived on Guam because I love the ocean just as much as she did. This story also taught an important lesson to kids that they need to listen to their parents. It might not necessarily apply today because belief in magical powers and curses is small but it still teaches a good lesson like most Traditional Literature novels do.

You can find variants of stories in every culture and while the plot remains almost the same the character change sometimes and so does the underlying message. The messages change from culture to culture depending on their values and mores at the time period in which the story was first told. Taking a look into these variants gives your students an understanding of other cultures and how mores and society has evolved over the centuries and decades as the case might be. This also gives you a common theme amongst separate cultures and gives great grounds for a cultural comparison within the context of literature and you can combined similar stories when you are studying different cultures in a history lesson to not only show the differences within a historical context but you can show similarities and differences within the context of literature.

The style of these stories is amazing. They are written to be spoken and work more effectively if you do it this way. Within these stories you catch a glimpse of common expressions used during the time period. Within these common expressions you have to be careful that they can be understood by the children that you are reading to. With these expressions you can also analyze them and have the kids come up with expressions that are more modern and more common today to supplement the older versions. You can do this with younger students as well as with older students but with varying degrees of complexity within the original story. These stories also have a particular cadence or rhythm to them that catches kid’s attention and they can easily fall into the rhythm with you as well. This cadence also keeps their attention a lot longer than just reading a book.

Some great exercises the make sure that the children understand the books that they just listened to is to create a story map and then turn it into a board game for the classroom with cards and pieces. The kids can then play each other’s games and it becomes a fun lesson. Another great thing to do is have the kids go home and interview their parents or grandparents or family members and have them tell family legends. With these legends you can bind them together and make a book for the classroom of all the family legends collected. Once that is done you can have the parents come and tell the stories to your class and make a theme day of it.

I really loved this chapter because I have always been really drawn to myths, legends and fairy tales. Reading this chapter bolstered my love for them even more and gave me more to think about when teaching stories like these.

Chapter 5: Poetry

I love poetry. It is fun to read and you get so much more out of it than you might expect. I am a huge fan of the older poets like Shakespeare, and some of the early 20th century poets like Emerson, Sassoon, and Poe. There is something very therapeutic about poetry and another reason I love it so much is because I have always had a knack for it. The musicality of poetry is another thing that definitely draws me into it. Songs are poems as well and really well written songs can be read as well as being sung. Analyzing song lyrics was always a fun thing to do especially in middle and high school so that the poems relate more to the students.

Poetry is a great teaching tool and is a great way to teach description and how to teach putting emotions into your writing especially for young writers as well as the more seasoned ones. The extensive use of adjectives makes this a great way to teach the children how to paint a picture with their words, it also helps expand the vocabulary of both elementary and secondary students alike. The more advanced you get you can teach them how to use punctuation in much the same way. Teaching students about poetry is also very therapeutic because instead of writing a paragraph about how they feel they can do it in a more cut down and succinct manner.

I am a fan of free form poetry because it is a lot easier to work with and teach. You don’t have specific guidelines to follow which makes it more freeing for the kids as well. Moving into rhyming it becomes more difficult the higher up you get to rhyme certain words to make your poem work and becomes a more tedious task to take on. Working with more structure provides the higher level thinking as well as doing some rudimentary analysis of the poem like asking how the poem makes the kids feel or what images popped into their heads as they read it, and what they learned from it if there was even a real reason behind why the poem was written.

While poetry is great for its purely aesthetic feel having your students read poetry written on specific subjects such as history can give students a great insight as to how some of the people during the time felt about certain events instead of just reading about them from history books. British War poems give you a great look into how the general public felt about their sons being sent off to war and how sometimes they were inadequately prepared for battle and ended up dying in masses because of this. Some other poets write about issues such as Social Justice and these are great to introduce to older students like those in Middle and High School. By introducing them to poems like these they can get a better feeling for issues in the world and the times that they live in.