How to Write a Hero/ine Adventure Journey Folktale: A Manual for Teachers of Grades 8 and 9 By Molly Bang Shebang Falmouth, Massachusetts How to Write a Hero/ine Adventure Journey Folktale: A Teacher's Manual for Grades 8 and 9 by Molly Bang Published by: Shebang Falmouth, Massachusetts 02541 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission from Shebang, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review. Copyright © 1988 by Shebang First Printing, October, 1988 Printed in the United States of America 987654321 1 Introduction! 8 Chapter 1. Course Introduction and Structural Analysis of the Tale! 14 Procedure! 14 1.! Describe the course.! 14 2.! Brainstorm about the elements of story. List elements on the board.! 14 3. Brainstorm about the elements of folktales and how these differ from other stories. List elements on board.! 15 4. Give short history of folktales! 15 5.! Read aloud four tales to the class.! 18 6. Help students identify elements from each tale, and add these to list for folktales.! 18 7. Help students define a pattern common to all four tales.! 19 Notes to teachers! 20 Chapter 2. Structural analysis: Seeing Variations on a Theme! 22 Materials! 22 Procedure! 22 1.! Hand out folktale folders and pattern sheets and explain their use.! 22 2.! Read a folktale aloud. (See Appendix for suggested folktales.)! 22 3.! Help class analyze the tale in relation to pattern.! 22 4.! Repeat this process for 10-15 stories.! 23 5.! Help class analyze a movie based on the HAJ pattern.! 23 Notes to teachers! 24 The pattern! 24 Kindnesses! 24 Movies! 25 Chapter 3.1. The Outline: Brainstorming about Tricks ! 27 Procedure! 27 1. Review tricks in folktales, movies and stories, categorizing them as you list each one.! 27 2. Provide a sample dangerous situation which students must overcome/ escape from with a trick from each category.! 28 3. Have the students practice with one or two exercises, in groups or as individual homework.! 29 Notes to teachers! 29 Examples of tricks! 29 Chapter 3.2. The Outline: Writing Order! 32 The Sections in Writing Order! 32 Explanation! 32 Chapter 3.3. The Outline: Brainstorming Each Section ! 34 I. Protagonist at Home! 34 II. The Dangers! 39 III. The Strangers: Their Plights, How they are helped, Their Gifts!42 IV. How Gifts help protagonists overcome Dangers! 45 V. Conclusion ! 50 Chapter 4. Symbols! 53 3 1. Discuss symbols in our daily lives! 54 2. Play with symbol exercises! 54 3. Discuss ideas of the soul! 55 4. Brainstorm about ideas of the soul.! 55 Notes to teachers! 55 Chapter 5. Writing the outline! 62 Procedure! 63 1. Fill in each section of the outline.! 63 2. Review each section of the outline with the checklist, first with the whole class, then in groups of two or three.! 63 3. Check once more for any points that aren't clear to the listener.! 63 4. Revise and rewrite.! 64 5. Review with the checklist once more, with another one or two students. ! 64 6. Revise and rewrite.! 64 7. Hand in to the teacher for comments.! 64 8. Revise and rewrite.! 64 Notes to teachers! 64 Example 1. The Ugly Dog! 65 Example 2. Milly! 68 Example 3. Oliver! 69 Part I. Home and Leaving Home! 69 Part II: The Dangers! 70 Part III Strangers: Their Plights and Their Gifts! 73 Part IV Gifts and Dangers! 77 Part V. Conclusion! 79 Chapter 6. Verse! 81 Procedure! 81 1. Discuss verses students know from folktales.! 81 2. Categorize how the verses are used.! 81 3. Read the class verses from other folktales:! 82 4.! Categorize these.! 83 5.! Students choose 2 or 3 places in their stories where verses might be used.! 84 6.! Students make up appropriate verses for these places.! 84 7.! Students share verses in small groups and revise.! 84 Chapter 7. Writing the Tale! 85 Procedure! 85 1.! Write and revise as for any writing piece.! 85 2.! Write final copy on 6 separate pages.! 85 Appendix! 86 Tyeh May and the Magic Brush! 86 Whitebear Whittington! 91 Wiley and the Hairy Man! 97 Savitri! 102 The Karate Kid: A Movie as Folktale! 106 Bibliography! 108 5 Folktales! 108 Books about Folktales! 109 Teaching books ! 111 Acknowledgements I've learned a lot more than I've taught. First and most important, I'd like to thank Ann Stern for letting me work with her in the Cambridge Public Schools. She supported and encouraged me consistently, - watching, analyzing, discussing, criticizing and suggesting innumerable improvements in class with children, in workshops with teachers and on these manuals. Her peculiar ability to see our diametrically opposite approaches to teaching as complementary rather than antagonistic made working with her a real joy. Thanks also to Carolyn Wyatt, without whose support this would not have been possible, and to Ellen Varella, for her warmth and enthusiasm. Many thanks to Falmouth Public School teachers, especially Joanne Holcomb, Lucy Flynn, Pat Sagar and Robert Shuman, who let me play with their students around this course in its earliest stages. Thanks also to teachers in Cambridge, Falmouth and Millersville, Pennsylvania who subjected themselves to taking the course and watching themselves become the artists they always were. I want to thank friends and family who read, reread, reread and commented on the text, especially Axel, Betsy and Katherine Bang, Jim Green, Preshiel Govind, Hilde Guttenplan, Sylvia Langford and Victoria Roth. Each person helped me see something in a new way, made me explain something more clearly, or helped me excise irrelevant material and mistakes. Thanks to Dick Campbell for helping me with Ventura Publisher when I was desperate. His patience and enthusiasm under fire are remarkable and appreciated. And lastly, thanks to Monika, who started it all. 7 Introduction Until four years ago, I was a writer and illustrator of children's books. I began teaching this course for two reasons. One, writing and illustrating is a very solitary business, and I wanted to be with other people. The second reason was peoples' questions about writing and illustrating. Over the years, many parents have told me how much they wanted to write something for their children, something better than what is 'out there', but they didn't know how to begin. Or people would ask, "How do you come up with your ideas?" "How do you draw so well?" The more I thought about it, the more I felt that I simply had access to and familiarity with certain patterns and structures that others weren't aware of, and that if I could just figure out what the patterns were and show them to people, everyone would be able to make stories and pictures that were meaningful. Our best work is not only meaningful to those who read or see it, it is the most meaningful to ourselves: it helps us to solve our troubles, assuage our pain, rejoice in our happiness and come to terms with our lives. I first taught as a volunteer in the Falmouth Public Schools, in my daughter's third grade class. I gave the children a formula to follow—similar to the one I call the Hero/ine Adventure Journey—in which each child was the hero or heroine of his or her own story. I began to work our some of the structural principles of illustration and had the children use cutout construction paper to illustrate the stories they wrote. Luckily, I was also teaching with another volunteer mother, Shirley Wozena, who brought in Native American folktales and showed the class examples of sand- paintings and rugs and baskets, and talked about the symbolism of the pictures. The children completed the project. It was clear that they understood the story structure to a large extent and could do what we asked, but somehow they weren't being touched to the core. They were much more interested in the precision of the Indian symbols, in making a key which explained the meaning of each symbol. They didn't like using cutout construction paper; cutting and pasting was an activity of first and second graders, and they were THIRD graders. They wanted to draw REAL things. They wanted to know about Native Americans, and knights and the Greeks; they wanted all the details. They wanted to use pens, pencils and magic markers— anything that made LINES—to draw unicorns, rainbows, princesses, rabbits (the girls), guns, rockets, tanks, knights and trucks (the boys). Maybe because Falmouth is on the sea, children of both sexes drew boats as well. I still think folktales are appropriate for third graders—for any age. Writing a story based on a folktale pattern—be it a tall tale, a pourquoi tale, a trickster tale or whatever— gives children a recognizable structure within which to work, but it allows them to do anything and everything within that structure. A folktale enables each child to be the hero or heroine of his or her own story, and to go on journeys, face dangers, solve problems and return home safely at the end. It allows them to explore who they are and who they want to be. It is a structure that enables a process to happen. The pattern I had used with the third grade was too complicated for them, and I didn't give them clear enough guidelines. Now when I work in the third grade, I use folktales as a springboard to talk about other cultures and other people.