A folktale from Panamá
Posted by mayralovesbooks on April 25, 2007
Just today, the librarian read Conejito: a Folktale from Panamá, written by Margaret Read MacDonald and illustrated by Geraldo Valério. The book seemed like a perfect read for two reasons: first, the librarian’s school’s fourth theme is ”We Share Stories of the World“, so a story from Panamá would be a good beginning. Second, since the folktale contained many words in Spanish, it would be easy to translate to Spanish as she read it to the students.
As soon as our friendly librarian began reading the book, she noticed that the song the main character sings was very familiar to her. As it turned out, it is a very popular children’s song that most of the students at the librarian’s school knew. The original song is in Spanish, while the verse written in the book is in English. Suddenly the librarian knew what she would do next. After reading the story to all third grade students, she would post information about the experience in the spider’s blog. And that is what she did.When the librarian searched online for a picture of the cover of the book, she found two extra resources:
- Margaret Read MacDonald’s website
- Links to lesson plans for the book, grades K-3
Coming up soon: the translated story is placed in a podcast (including the song). Stay tuned!
Eric Wolf said
I interviewed Margaret Read Macdonald for an hour on my podcast the Art of Storytelling with Children. She spoke about working as an English speaking storyteller in countries where she had to use a translator to tell stories. She also spoke about her work collecting stories over seas and how she goes about getting permission to use stories like the book you discussed.
Here is the link to her interview if you want to take a listen.
http://www.storytellingwithchildren.com/?p=74
Eric Wolf