One World, Many Stories :: Week 2 :: The Stories We Tell :: Trickster Tales

We Read:

Jabuti the Tortoise, by Gerald McDermott,

Anansi and the Magic Stick, by Eric A. Kimmel

and

Love and Roast Chicken, by Barbara Knutson. (Love this story! Cuy is such a tricky little Guinnea Pig!)

 

We Made:

Stick puppets so the kids can tell their own trickster tales! At first, I was going to draw animals that were featured in the stories we read, but then I remembered that Jan Brett is the best, and I just decided to use these fantastic animals from her Mitten story.

Have you been to Jan Brett's website yet? It's fabulous, with projects from all her stories, all with her gorgeous illustrations. I've used these animals before when I read The Mitten to my preschoolers, and the kids are always really responsive to them.

This time, I had my mom create a mirror image of the pdf file, so we could have a front and back to our puppets, and then I copied them on to card stock to give them some heft. The kids then colored the animals, matching front to back as they liked and then glued them together with a thin craft stick in between. Instant puppet!

I made a little puppet stage out of one of my dad's old shoe boxes, just to show the kids how they could make their puppet play even better at home. I was very pleased at how hard the kids worked and how, when they had a puppet or two completed, little bits of play popped up all over the room!

 

We Ate:

Sweet Potato Muffins. So fabulous! And easy too! (Says the girl who had her mother-in-law and friend come to the library and make them while she worked the desk...) I saw this snack included with a lesson plan for Anansi and the Moss Covered Rock, and as we were reading our own Anansi tale and sweet potatoes are easily accessible in all the countries our stories hailed from, I thought they would be perfect. And they were. So, so perfect!