Monday, April 25, 2011

What's going on in Kindergarten and 1st Grade?

Kindergarten and first graders have been enjoying our new unit on noodlehead stories! Noodlehead tales poke gentle fun at individuals - or sometimes entire villages, such as Chelm or Gotham - who behave in a silly manner.

In addition to providing a lot of good laughs, sharing these tales from around the world reinforces a bit of geography (we start every story with a look at the globe) and reminds students of some of the universalities of human culture. They are starting to notice commonalities between, for example, a noodlehead situation in a Goha story from the Middle East, a Cajun story from Louisiana and a story from England.

I am also combining reading books with storytelling - which of course is the way that stories were primarily transmitted from generation to generation long before the written word! Storytelling is enjoying something of a rebirth in popularity at the moment and I find that students respond eagerly to the immediacy and physicality of it.

If you'd like to enjoy more noodlehead stories at home, you can do a web search and find many sites that list them. Noodleheads: The Wisdom of Fools is a favorite of mine which lists many great books.

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