Storytelling: Any Room for Me? by Loek Koopmans, on a snowy day!

Saturday was a very special day where we are: we woke up to find our world hidden under a couple of centimetres of snow, and more was falling fast. Now, this is a bit like Christmas: it happens but once a year (at most) and it's REALLY exciting! We obviously had to get out there and throw some snowballs!

















I had a storytelling session later on, and had planned to tell The Ugly Duckling, sing 5 Little Ducks Went Swimming One Day and do a cute little make-a-duck craft... Quite spring-like and totally unsuitable all of a sudden! So I went into last minute planning mode, and came up with a (snowy) plan B:

Book: Any Room for Me? by Loek Koopmans (Floris Books, Edinburgh, 1992)
Craft: Make a cardboard snowman
Song: Couldn't think of anything snowy not related to Christmas :-( So we did Hickory Dickory Dock. OK, unrelated, but the planning time was shoooooooort! Here are some of the results:

 

The kids loved them! (Copyright on the snowmen creations EZ i AA!)

Any Room for Me? by Loek Koopmans is a beautiful, magical, funny story that kids love. An old man drops his woolly mitten in the snow, and several of the wild inhabitants of the surrounding woods immediately see its great potential for a lovely warm house, much to the surprise of the old man's little dog!

The story is a tender and amusing reflection on sharing, even with the most unlikely of companions, with a fun will-he won't he? can he can't he? cliffhanger on every page that all children I've read this story with just love. I enjoy building up this sense of anticipation as we wonder if yet another, even bigger, animal will be able to snuggle into the mitten. And there is a real sense of delight and satisfaction when, time after time, he can and he does! Look how warm they are all snuggled up together!

Storytelling: Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see? Bill Martin Jr & Eric Carle

As well as reading to my little book bugs at home, I also do storytelling sessions for non-English-speaking 2 to 6-year-olds and their carers in my local bookshop. The aim is for families to take part together in fun activities, share as many lovely books as possible, and learn and/or practise a bit of English!

I want the sessions to be fun and participative, and not too hard on tender, non-native attention spans, so we mix stories, songs, crafts and games for 45 minutes a time.

So this is the first post about these sessions. See what you think.


Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see?

Hamish Hamilton, London, 1996

Main Target Vocabulary: animals, colours, same/ different

Session One

·   Starter: Sit in a circle and greet each child individually by name.

·      Read Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see? book with different voices and sound effects for each animal. Check out the author reading it himself on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdHCYgO9zh8

I expressed surprised at the blue horse and the purple cat (isn’t that strange?!) and we laughed, but otherwise read it straight through so as not to lose the children’s attention. I tried to get my listeners to join in with the last page when the children list all the animals they see looking at them. They are non-natives with little to no exposure to English, so they joined in in Catalan: I read, “A yellow…?” with rising intonation and paused for them to fill in the animal, which they did in Catalan, I repeated the target word in English, and onto the next animal. For me, the most important thing is that the children enjoy the story and follow as much of it as they can, so if they’re participating, even in their own language, that’s great! A round of applause and “Bravo!” ends each activity.

Room on the Broom, Julia Donaldson & Axel Scheffler

Perhaps I shouldn't review anything by the award- winning Donaldson- Scheffler team if I don't start with The Gruffalo, the most well-known of their books. But just because everyone has heard of The Gruffalo, I wanted to start with another one, and I think this one is brilliant, definitely up there with The Gruffalo itself! It's also one that a friend of mine doesn't have. I promised him this review, and I hope it convinces him to get it for his little girl.

Room on the Broom is a fantastic treatise on the value of sharing and of having friends! A series of animals help a butterfingered witch get her belongings back as, one by one, they fall off her broomstick, and in return she and her cat allow them to clamber on and share a windswept ride with them, until the broomstick becomes quite crowded and disaster strikes! Luckily, the witch’s newfound friends are there to help her out of the sticky situation she finds herself in.

Dinosaur Roar, Paul & Henrietta Stickland

I love dinosaurs! This lovely book is a picture catalogue of dinosaurs big and small who are all different but share one thing in common: they're all hungry! The beautiful ink illustrations feature fangs and claws galore in a fantastic parade of real and invented dinosaurs, and the rhyming text links them in pairs of opposites: fast/slow, above/below etc. 

Why not use it with emerging readers, too? The repetition produced by the rhyme gives practice with several different letter combinations.

There's loads to talk about in this book: colours, parts of the body, or the adjectives suggested by the text itself. Great for natives and non-natives.

Español: ¡Me encantan los dinosaurios! Este divertido libro es un catálogo de dinosaurios grandes y pequeños, todos diferentes pero con una cosa en común: ¡todos tienen hambre! Las preciosas ilustraciones en tinta muestran una serie de dinosaurios variopinta, repleta de garras y dientes afilados, y el texto los junta en parejas de opuestos: lento/rápido, encima/debajo, etc.

¿Porqué no usarlo en las primeras fases de la lectura en inglés también? La repetición que proporcionan las rimas facilita la práctica de varias combinaciones de letras.

Este libro da mucho de que hablar con los peques: los colores, las partes del cuerpo, o los mismos adjetivos reflejados en el texto. Muy divertido para nativos y no nativos.

Monkey and Me, Emily Gravett

This great little rhyming book tells the story of a little girl and her monkey and their trip to the zoo. The wonderful illustrations and rhythm have kept both of my little ones crying out for this one again and again. The vocabulary is simple and the illustrations clearly outline the story, which makes it a fantastic read for both native and non-native speakers.

I could also see this book being used with slightly older children to stimulate first reading skills: the repetition gives them security, the illustrations facilitate, and the length of the book gives them a goal that is easily reached.

One of our favourites!



Español: Este divertido libro cuenta la rítmica historia de una niña y su mono de peluche y su visita al zoo. El vocabulario es muy sencillo, y las preciosas ilustraciones contribuyen de forma esencial al desarrollo de la historia, lo cual lo hace una opción perfecta tanto para nativos como para no nativos. Mis pequeñajos me lo piden una y otra vez.

También recomendaría este libro para niños un pelín más mayores para estimular las primeras fases de la lectura: la repetición les da seguridad, las ilustraciones les facilita la tarea, y la reducida duración les presenta una meta fácil de alcanzar. 

¡Uno de nuestros preferidos!