Little Red Riding Hood

Little Red Riding Hood, traditional fairy tale. (Session Two)

The stars of the story!

Main Target Vocabulary: not hugely specific! Facial features; verbs of movement: walk, run, talk. Family members: mother, grandmother. Wolf. General comprehension and enjoyment of a traditional story.

The plan:

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

Song: The Rainbow Song (revision)

Tell Little Red: with small finger puppets.

Activity: Make a forest collage. Retell story using collage as a background

Song: Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes (new)

(Make masks: Little Red, the wolf, the woodcutter.)

Ender: Sit in circle and say goodbye to each child individually.

Who came? 9 children: 15 months, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 5

Our forest collage!

This session was a challenging one. It had been raining and the kids hadn’t been able to play outside all day, so they were pretty antsy. And by now it was warm and muggy, which didn’t help. We were in a smaller space with several distracting objects and a staircase, all of which were much more interesting than sitting in a circle listening to someone talking in a language we don’t understand, especially for the littler ones. We felt claustrophobic and cranky.

I’d decided to use finger puppets to tell Little Red, but I didn’t want to hide behind a theatre as I feel the children understand the English better if they can see my face. I use eye contact and voice direction a great deal to capture wandering attention and interact with rapt attention. Yet I think this made the focus of the action unclear and bitty. Perhaps simply acting out the story would have been easier for them to follow. Or sticking to the puppet theatre with the small puppets.

The collage was fun to do, but didn't turn out at all how I'd expected it to! Materials:

• large piece of brown paper
• card: green triangles, orange and green blob shapes, brown branch shapes
• strips of brown tissue paper
• bits of cotton wool
• flowers cut out of some old wrapping paper
• outlines of a house
• cut outs to colour of the Little Red characters http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/sites/teacheng/files/colour.pdf
• glue sticks, crayons

I told the children I wanted to make a forest and showed them the bits and pieces I'd brought. (The older kids were quite into it, but the little ones were much more into the possibilities the stairs offered them.) I'd foolishly thought that they'd all (with parents' help) piece together an orderly wood just as I would have, but upways and rightways are irrelevant when you've got a gluestick in your hand, and our wood came out a bit more abstract than I'd imagined it! But I think it looks great! And Little Red and her friends look very much at home! What do you think?

In the end I didn't retell the story with the forest as a background because we'd already stuck the characters on, the collage wouldn't hold up on the wall where I wanted it to, and the kids weren't in any sort of listening mood. We sang our songs again.

There wasn't time to do the masks, either. I had planned for the children to colour them in, then stick them on lollipop sticks. Link for masks:

http://www.sparklebox.co.uk/previews/8726-8750/sb8738-red-riding-hood-masks.html#.UKF7kY6f8uo

For our ender we sat in a circle and I said goodbye to each of the children while wriggling my nose, in the hope that they would pick up on it and copy me, as they had with the toes in the previous session, but no one did. They just looked at me strangely as if to say "Why is this strange woman who speaks so weirdly doing this now? And what am I supposed to do about it? And can I go home now?"

Hopefully, next week will be simpler...

 

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