The book I chose for this week's folklore theme is "The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales" written and illustrated by John Scieszka and Lane Smith.
This book talks about different fairy tales and puts a twist on those stories. For example, the Princess and the Pea story is put to a twist when it is switched to a prince and he puts a bowling ball under the mattresses his potential future wife is sleeping on.
Another twist in the regular fairy tales that we all know about is The Ugly Duckling, in this book, the ugly duckling knows that he will turn into a beautiful swan so he doesn't care but eventually he just ends up being a very ugly duck.
The book contains many stories with a dark twist on it.
The illustration style is very dark and slightly creepy. It reminds me of some of the drawings shown in the Courage the Cowardly Dog series. I think it fits the overall theme of the book, which is chaotic to begin with anyway.
It is tough finding social justice elements that I want to incorporate from this book because they are all very brief and... to be honest, they don't exactly promote positive morals (i.e. encouraging lying in the Prince & the Pea story). However, I could use all of the negatives in this story to ask my students how they would have handled the story better. For example, with the Prince & the Pea story, I could ask my students how they would have approached the situation, how they would have talked with their parents, how to get away from it without lying, et cetera.
I think your selection of this book was well done because this allows students in the classroom to see the different examples of folklore, this gives the students more of a chance of understanding what folklore is all about and what kind of stories are discussed. I agree with your moral of the stories of some that you listed below, they don't have exactly have the best kind of ending with a great moral but that is okay because students get the chance not everything we read is always positive. Great selection of book!
ReplyDeleteI would never thought of having folklores with dark twist in it as I find it pretty cool and interesting! Rather than all other common folklores we all know of. But agreed with you about the last part by asking students how they could handle the story better? I think that would make them think throughout and look at positive side instead. Overall this is one interesting book!
ReplyDeleteThis is a great book. Because it changes the typical tales, it gets children thinking, and also gives them prompts to create their own renditions of the same stories. It is also true that you could use reverse psychology on the children and teach them from the negative behaviours in the stories.
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