Journal #4

Double Entry Journal- Chapter 4:  Children’s Literature

Kimberly Artman- September 20, 2012

     Once again Pamela Farris has another informational chapter in Children’s Literature.  She explains that there are many aspects to making a well written children’s book.  She describes the importance of various aspects in literary elements such as characterization, plot, setting, theme, style and illustration.  Farris goes into further detail showing the different genre’s of children's literature like traditional, modern fantasy, contemporary realistic fiction, historical fiction, biography and autobiography, informational and poetry.  One of the things that she also covered was multicultural books which expose children to different cultures.  Some  of the many books I have on my shelf are about cultures like Hispanics, Chinese, African Americans, and Native Americans.  I was excited to see that there is criteria set forth in multicultural books as some are indeed biased and not written to educate and connect various groups.  She also mentions thematic units for children and expanding these units to integrate Science, History,  and cultural studies. 

     I decided to do a thematic unit on storytelling.  I use the long connected computer paper and spread it out on my cafeteria tables.  The students were divided into groups of three and were given two sections of the paper.   The child that was sitting on the far left was to do the title page and first page of the book, the student in the middle had come up with a climatic point in the story, and the student at the end was to wrap up the story and provide a moral or lesson that was learned.  I also decided to use a different theme at each table so the whole class had to come up with a different story based on the books placed in front of them.  The sections of books for this theme based group lesson included some of the following categories:  Sea Life, Trains, Native Americans, Colors, Animals, Fantasy characters, and famous artists.  Children were told to look through the books but not copy the existing story but one that was produced by their specific group.  One group had famous artists and the books in front of them contained cartoon images by Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Georgia O’Keeffe, Vincent Van Gogh, and Salvador Dali.  They were doing fine until one of the children started to cry.  She was the analytical, fact driven child.  I asked her why she was upset and she told me that they were drawing the book all wrong.  I asked her group what that story was about and it was based off a book by Salvador Dali called Dali and the Path of Dreams.  Dali was a surrealist and the book involved an adventure with long legged elephants, flying clocks and a magic key.  The students in the group decided to come up with a story with talking eggs, a giant cat, and an ice cream house.  The little girl was disturbed because she was at the beginning and drew a big cat.  The student in the middle drew eggs walking down a path looking out for the giant cat and the last student wrapped up the story with the cat leaping on the eggs before reaching the ice cream house.  She was upset that the story didn’t make sense and that cats wouldn’t eat eggs and if the cat did pounce on them that they would break.  Furthermore the ice cream house would melt as she drew a bright sun on her paper with the giant cat.  This was my first experience explaining that surrealist like imagination and the story doesn’t have to make sense.  She said she needed another piece of paper to take out the sun to make the story believable.  I let her redraw her part to specifications.  She was a cute child but needed to loosen up a little in imagination driven books.