"I was astonished to witness how easily and quickly children can invent their own stories and how much writing they can do if they get involved in the stories personally."
Questions that I often ask about kids in schools today...do we ask them to connect the stories they hear to the lives they live? Do we make time for stories? Do we listen to their observations and the connections they make to the books that we read to them daily? Do we read to them daily? The question that Veronika Charles asked was about children and stories, too. She wondered if twenty-first century children, accustomed to the visual culture that bombards them and demands fast reaction, have the patience to read and to listen to the 'old' stories that gave her so much comfort in times of stress. It became the subject of her thesis and this book is the result of the many discoveries she made.
Written for the early years classroom as inspiration to get students reading and writing using the fairy tale as guide, Veronika Charles has created a useful, informative book. Fairy tales have been with us forever...well, I know for a long time as my Mom read and told them as stories to my brother and I when we were young! And, I am often reminded that I am as old as dirt! So, their long life is a given and whether they might inspire writing, art and other areas of the curriculum was the premise for her work in classrooms.
In an accessible exploration of the genre and with many ideas and inspirations shared, the author provides valuable lessons to teachers that will encourage them to use fairy tales as a starting point for student writing and illustrating retellings of the old stories. Inspired by one classroom after another, she gathered her research findings. She lists factors that show their importance and explains that an interactive approach using graphic symbols can impact all students, no matter their learning prowess or difficulty. As in all good nonfiction you do not need to read from front to back, or even the whole book. If you are interested in getting started, she encourages you to jump straight to the 10th chapter where she gives step-by-step instructions for her methods and process. She shares titles to be read in preparation for choosing a story to emulate, and is clear in her ideas for proceeding. You can do it that way, but I think you will find yourself going back to earlier chapters to see what you have missed. If you don't read the whole book, you miss a lot, and it's empowering and insightful stuff.
Using her approach to build a classroom story, the students drive the writing, inspiring inventive, spontaneous stories that will give them a scaffold for future writing. Students are encouraged to respond through illustration, which allows for differences in culture, home, family and experience. Finding stories can prove cumbersome and time-consuming so she provides an initial list to get classrooms going. She encourages this method in grade two and three classrooms as she found it worked less well with older students, whose view of the world tends toward realism.
Of course there are more reasons for using fairy tales in the early years classroom; but this author is intrigued by their use in helping children write well using traditional lore as a stepping stone. She has provided us with unique and worthwhile ideas to help meet that end.
"Thus, when I read the manuscript for Fairy Tales in the Classroom and found Charles applying these landmark ideas to an impressive study involving more than 700 students in 23 classrooms in 15 schools of diverse racial and socioecoomic backgrounds, I was struck by what a uniquely valuable body of evidence she has provided for all of us who explore the relationship of children and story."
(Betsy Hearne, Foreword)
No comments:
Post a Comment