Well, it is certainly great to be back. It was a great holiday and it was so nice to be able to spend time with my children. These years are so precious and it was nice to be able to sit back and have fun with my little Liam and my growing Siena. I hope your holidays were full of fun and joy as you celebrated the birth of our Lord.

I wanted to just let you know about what was happening in Language Arts. We have continued with our exploration of Literature Circles. Literature Circles are a great way to involve students in discussing and thinking about books in ways that are truly participatory with higher level thinking. However, they do involve a lot of modelling so that they are effective. As part of our exploration, we have so far looked at 3 of the five roles we will be doing. Students have done the Discussion Director Role, the Illustrator role and we are now on the Dictionary Dude role. To help us with these roles, we have been looking African Folktales. These short stories are great to quickly get into each of the roles. Plus, they are a lot of fun to read as students learn about storytelling and the role storytelling has in our culture and the culture of other countries.

Today we looked at the story, “Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears?” As part of our discussion, we talked about how some cultures or groups often used stories as a way to explain the natural things they saw around them. So in this case, this story was a way for the African cultures to explain, in a funny way, why mosquitoes buzz in our ears. Now, I don’t know if that is actually what they thought for real, a long time ago. But . . .

Anyway. We then watched a great video of the same story, which I thought I would share with you here. I also included some other videos where cultures have tried to explain the reason for other things they wondered about.

Hey class! Did you like the videos? Let me know by adding a comment!!! Do you think people really believed these stories?