Post by pudgimelon on Feb 14, 2008 12:23:12 GMT
I mentioned before that I've been reading Gunnerkrigg Court to my Grade 2 classroom in Thailand. The kids love the story and they get very excited when I pulled down the projector screen in the front of the classroom to show the comic.
As a class, we're only up to chapter 10 now, but many of the students have requested the URL of the comic so they can read ahead at home with their parents.
I also have them convinced that our P.E. teacher is also a dragon-slayer (every P.E. teacher is one, of course!), but they don't quite believe me (yet) when I tell them that our school also has secret rooms filled with ghosts, minotaurs, and alcoholic cherry trees (well, at least every teachers lounge should have the latter, hahah!).
The kids love discussing the comic, and they've made some pretty insightful comments about it. For example, they think there is "a bad man" in the forest who made the bad shadow man force Robot to push Annie off the bridge. They also think that this bad man doesn't like Reynardine and wants to kill him. (They also think that Winsbury kissing Janet is both very exciting and really, really gross
).
I read the comic to them during the morning homeroom and sometimes in the afternoon if we have a bit of free time. You should have seen them after Robot pushed Annie off the bridge. They talked about it all day and they were really worried about Annie (although most of the kids thought that the birds would come to save her).
At first, I was a bit worried about scenes like Mort's eyeless clown. I thought it might be a bit too much for them. But then again, most of these kids play GTA and their parents take them to see Aliens vs. Predators 2 without blinking an eye, so they took it in stride. It also helped that they knew it was really Mort and that he's "not very scary". Their reaction to the White Lady, however, was very different. When she showed up, the classroom got very quiet (I was reading "dramatically" too, so they knew she was not a nice ghost).
For some reason, they really love Reynardine. I think it's because Kat thinks he's cute and they all think Kat is the best friend ever (so she can't be wrong about anything). I'm sure they'd all love to have a toy like Reynardine. I keep telling them that he's really a dangerous demon spirit, but for some reason, that just makes him cooler as a toy.... Kids these days...
Like I said, they really love this story, so today I had them write some Valentine letters to their favorite characters. Annie, of course, was the most popular, but Reynardine also got a lot of letters and even Winsbury got one!
One of the things the kids asked Annie a lot was whether or not she "loved Reynardine or her toy". Which is an interesting perspective that I think we adults sometimes forget. You see, for children, toys are real, which means to that when Reynardine entered the toy, he must have "killed" the toy's "real" personality, much in the same way that Rey killed Sivo when he left the dragon's body.
So the kids are real curious to know whether Annie prefers to have a super-cool, shape-shifting, talking demon toy that's both evil and cute at the same time, or if she misses her "old friend", whomever the toy "really was" to her.
Anyway, I scanned some of the letters here. The jpgs are quite long, so I'll post them as separate replies to this post. I hope you all enjoy Valentine greetings from my Grade 2 class in Thailand, but remember this is an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) class, so their level is a bit below what an American or English 2nd grader could produce. So cut them a break on the spelling and grammar errors, it's not bad for a bunch of 7 year-old Thai kids.
Here are the letters:
As a class, we're only up to chapter 10 now, but many of the students have requested the URL of the comic so they can read ahead at home with their parents.
I also have them convinced that our P.E. teacher is also a dragon-slayer (every P.E. teacher is one, of course!), but they don't quite believe me (yet) when I tell them that our school also has secret rooms filled with ghosts, minotaurs, and alcoholic cherry trees (well, at least every teachers lounge should have the latter, hahah!).
The kids love discussing the comic, and they've made some pretty insightful comments about it. For example, they think there is "a bad man" in the forest who made the bad shadow man force Robot to push Annie off the bridge. They also think that this bad man doesn't like Reynardine and wants to kill him. (They also think that Winsbury kissing Janet is both very exciting and really, really gross
).I read the comic to them during the morning homeroom and sometimes in the afternoon if we have a bit of free time. You should have seen them after Robot pushed Annie off the bridge. They talked about it all day and they were really worried about Annie (although most of the kids thought that the birds would come to save her).
At first, I was a bit worried about scenes like Mort's eyeless clown. I thought it might be a bit too much for them. But then again, most of these kids play GTA and their parents take them to see Aliens vs. Predators 2 without blinking an eye, so they took it in stride. It also helped that they knew it was really Mort and that he's "not very scary". Their reaction to the White Lady, however, was very different. When she showed up, the classroom got very quiet (I was reading "dramatically" too, so they knew she was not a nice ghost).
For some reason, they really love Reynardine. I think it's because Kat thinks he's cute and they all think Kat is the best friend ever (so she can't be wrong about anything). I'm sure they'd all love to have a toy like Reynardine. I keep telling them that he's really a dangerous demon spirit, but for some reason, that just makes him cooler as a toy.... Kids these days...
Like I said, they really love this story, so today I had them write some Valentine letters to their favorite characters. Annie, of course, was the most popular, but Reynardine also got a lot of letters and even Winsbury got one!
One of the things the kids asked Annie a lot was whether or not she "loved Reynardine or her toy". Which is an interesting perspective that I think we adults sometimes forget. You see, for children, toys are real, which means to that when Reynardine entered the toy, he must have "killed" the toy's "real" personality, much in the same way that Rey killed Sivo when he left the dragon's body.
So the kids are real curious to know whether Annie prefers to have a super-cool, shape-shifting, talking demon toy that's both evil and cute at the same time, or if she misses her "old friend", whomever the toy "really was" to her.
Anyway, I scanned some of the letters here. The jpgs are quite long, so I'll post them as separate replies to this post. I hope you all enjoy Valentine greetings from my Grade 2 class in Thailand, but remember this is an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) class, so their level is a bit below what an American or English 2nd grader could produce. So cut them a break on the spelling and grammar errors, it's not bad for a bunch of 7 year-old Thai kids.
Here are the letters:
), but I'll try.