Category: LIT

On Tuesday I read Very Last First Time by Jan Andrews.  I did not relate this particular book to music, but I do think the book could certainly be used in some classroom settings. The illustrations were detailed, and I liked the thoughtful objects, like the box of Kellogg’s Cornflakes on the kitchen table, would help make a connection with students from many different places and cultures.

I did not know prior to the book that, in extra cold places, the top of the ocean freezes, but people can dig underneath that ice and collect mussels when the tide is low! Super cool….

The bool really is a story about coming of age; it is about taking one’s first steps of independence. The main character is a girl setting off for her first walk under the ocean all by herself. She is nervous and excited. When she is left on her own, she goes through successive emotions and experiences, from excitement to responsibility to fear. I think she also comes home with a renewed appreciation for her family and the comfort and stability they represent.

This book could be applied to psychology or art or life sciences. In a music setting, I would perhaps look for a song about fishing under the water and introduce this book as an introduction to the music.

In the time allotted for the picture book section in class, I read through 3 of them and looked at and quickly dismissed 2 more. Honestly, I found two of the three I read to be rather boring, moralistic, pedantic, and badly written. I think that, in general, one really needs to have a good, well-written story to catch students’ attentions if one is to use picture books at the secondary level.

The major exception among the books I read was a book entitled “the Hungry Giant of the Tundra.” It was engaging from front to back. The illustrations were crisp and colorful and beautiful, and the faces very much had the look of the Yup’ik people, whose story the author claimed to be retelling.

The basic plot of the story was that there were these kids playing out on the tundra and they were supposed to come back in at a certain time.  But they were enjoying themselves, so they stayed out and got captured by this ugly child-eating tundra giant.

With the help of some animal friends, they elude the giant, and one of the animals even kills him.

The moral of the story of course is that kids should obey their parents.

As it is told, the story reminds me greatly of the traditional European fairy tale “Jack and the Beanstalk.”  I am wondering, since we are informed that the story is “retold” by the book’s author, whether or not there is any European cross-pollination in the plotline.  A way I could see using it in the classroom (especially in a Lit class) would be to find a more traditional telling of the story in Yup’ik terms and then place it next to Jack and the Beanstalk and ask the kids to compare and contrast the three, trying to answer the question of how, if at all, Jack and the Beanstalk may have influenced the retelling of this Yup’ik tale.  I think it would be an enjoyable question to answer, and could get kids thinking about the way stories can be retold in later settings and by later people.  I might even ask them to prepare a retelling of another story for me, or perhaps a retelling intentionally peppered with elements of another tale.  It could really be a lot of fun.

The Girl Who Swam with the Fish / Secret of the dance (Andrea Spalding and Alfred Scow)

Kathy Nielsen visited us to present some of her wisdom regarding engaging students in the classroom. Kathy is a strong advocate for reading to her students. That may really not seem too extraordinary, but the fact that she advocates reading children’s books to older students was, well, a little baffling at first. However, once she read aloud to us the book “Secret of the Dance” it was clear what she was doing. Beyond telling us about the benefits of a technique she modeled it. The reading pulled us in, created an access point to the topic in for those with little experience with the topic, and allowed us to momentarily adopt the perspective of the main character in the story. From this base we were able to launch into a brief discussion with regard to the meaning of the text and how it would be a great Segway into a deeper discussion.

Following we read though a few books on our own and were instructed to select at one that we would/could see ourselves using in our respective classrooms. I selected, The Girl Who Swam with the Fish by Michelle Renner. This story of a girl who wonders about the life and journey of the salmon that sustain here people is swept away by the very river she is monitoring in anticipation of the salmon’s pending return. All at once she is transformed into a fish and she is now experiencing the things she had wondered about and through the fish’s eyes, traveling to the sea and then returning to her home stream and to her village site. The tale ends with here safe return back as a little girl where she then shares her adventurous tale with her relieved and surprised family.

The tale would serve to discuss not only the importance of the resources around us, but also the importance of the salmon to the inhabitants the rely on the river for sustenance. This is significant today because of dwindling salmon stocks, combined with untold environmental stressors like habitat destruction, water pollution, acidification of the ocean, climate change, water diversion, over fishing, and the list continues. Highlighting these factors as a threats to the natural cycle and sustainable population of salmon is worth discussing with students and can be framed in, or approached from a multidisciplinary fashion.

I’ve never thought about using children’s stories as starting points for high school and middle school lesson plans but Kathy Neilson really showed how they can pique interest or be jumping off points of culturally relevant lessons. I picked the The Tale of an Alaska Whale which is a Tlinget story involving a man who made the other hunters jealous so they stranded him on a rock in the middle of the ocean. The sea lions helped him return home and he plotted revenge against the other hunters. At first I didn’t see how it could be tied to science but Mrs. Neilson showed me how this man in plotting revenge, is conducting an experiment. His experiment involves carving a killer whale from different types of trees. First he tries alder and it is too heavy and didn’t float well. Then he tried Red Cedar and it floated too much. Then he tried yellow cedar and it was perfect. The yellow cedar killer whale then proceeded to kill all the hunters who had wronged him. This experiment could be replicated with the cooperation of a shop class and maybe a local elder or artist to explore the properties of different types of wood.  I love the idea of using children’s books and I will be on the look out for books I can use and how to use them in my class.

Blackerby, A.W. and Linn A. Forrest. Tale of an Alaska Whale. Portland. Binford &Mort. 1955.