No Shelf-Control

Even though I have never taught students younger than middle school, I have always loved reading aloud children's books. I just love the stories that can be shared within a few short pages. My mom has bought me children's books every Christmas since 2013 because she knows of my passion for them. Because of this I had some big decisions to make with which book I was going to do my first reading with for this class. I chose Beekle the Unimaginary Friend by Dan Santat. My fiancée introduced this book to me last year and I absolutely fell in love with it. She had used it for a storybook drama in one of her theatre classes so I knew it would lend itself to a read aloud. I think Beekle is a great starting point for storytelling because the book is actually meant to seem as if the main character wrote it about her creating Beekle. It is kind of a story on storytelling so starting there felt natural.  I started the process by rereading the book a few times to get a feel for how it shou...

 Chapter 1 Takeaways: I always knew that storytelling played a huge role in early civilization due to a written language not being developed yet, and I always loved that these stories would be a combination of information and whimsy. This chapter gave me a deeper insight into what these forms of early storytelling may have looked like. The first chapter tells that everyone was a storyteller, not just children, the way things seem to be in this day in age  (Greene & Del Negro, 2010, p.4) . I feel that we as adults have gotten so far from this and need to go back to our storytelling roots, but being more expressive and drawing our listeners in rather than just giving out basic information. Chapter One discusses the shift from oral storytelling into written stories for children when discussing the Grimm Brothers. They collected oral stories and changed them into the written Fairy Tales that we as a society have all come to know and love  (Greene & Del Negro, 2010, p....