A folktale from Panamá

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!

The librarian and her friends try to podcast!

Here we have the first podcast the librarian and her friends did. They were putting together an assignment for their digital media course and decided to package it in the form of a podcast. Go to Podcasting534 and click on the Podcasting 534 tab. You should be able to listen to a few good reasons to podcast with your students.

I bet the librarian is going to try to put together her own podcast soon! Both Sophie and I have a feeling that it will have something to do with books. Aren’t tarantulas smart?