How the Grinch Stole Christmas has been a part of my holiday celebrations for over 40 years. I love this story! The humour, drama and rhyming text build to expertly give the message that toys are not what this time of year is about. It's about celebrating and being thankful for the love of friends and family. Although this is a Christmas story, the message can be appreciated by anyone. I read this story as a preamble to our watching the cartoon version.
The class watched this as a companion piece to hearing the book version read aloud. Hearing Boris Karloff's voice telling the story of How the Grinch Stole Christmas brings back lots of memories for me and my children. This cartoon stays faithful to the story by Dr. Seuss, but adds some wonderful songs to help the story along. When my children were little, I bought the video version of this cartoon and to my horror, there was a different voice telling the story over the original cartoon. How disappointing! I believe that Boris Karloff makes this verison the classic that it is. The director, Chuck Jones (he directed many of the "Loony Tunes" cartoons) did a brilliant job adapting the book. In my opinion, this cartoon is perfect.
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is another holiday classic. Even though many students do not celebrate Christmas, it is important to give them context for many of the songs and images they see this time of year. This is a great story to discuss important universal themes like bullying and being different. The students are now becoming more sophisticated in their ability to discuss books by answering questions like, "Why was Rudolph so sad at the beginning of the story?" and "How do you know" and giving evidence from the text to support their answers. It was a powerful lesson for the students when they realize that the very thing that Rudolph was bullied for (having a different nose) was the thing that saved the day at the end of the story.
No comments:
Post a Comment