Each class, the students got to read either with me or on their own our stories that got them across various landscapes around the world and work on various arts and crafts, reports or summaries about the stories they studied, their authors, or the themes that these stories covered. By the end of each class, the students got their hands full of various assignments given throughout our two hours together and were tasked to send them to me via Seesaw for live corrections. That was a great way to emulate actual classwork while operating within a work-from-home environment. We also took a lot of pictures to immortalize the fond memories we’ve all created together.
Our first story was titled Stick Man It is a fantastic story about a living stick people confuse for a normal, dead stick you’d find on the ground. The reader is thus being carried through space and time as the main character, Stick Man, is being manhandled by various people and animals. This was the perfect story to begin our summer camp with, as it introduced us to some vocabulary, we would see throughout the following two months as well as notions such as genre and characters. We also did some interesting crafts centered around our main character, something we would do again with the following stories.

In August, the students travelled deep into their imagination as we discovered the burlesque world of America’s most celebrated children’s book author: Dr Seuss and the book we chose for the task was none other than The Cat in the Hat, which has been the author’s biggest literary success. With the Cat in the Hat, the students learnt about the importance of poetry and perfected their intonation skills, which are widely used in the book to illustrate the character’s feelings that the author aims at sharing throughout the story. The story’s ludicrous scenario also allowed us to reflect on our own interpretation of the story: Was the Cat a babysitter the mother had hired? Was it all a dream? Was it an alien? The debates we had in class were certainly most fascinating! Of course, we accompanied those discussions with some very creative arts and crafts and side activities. The students had the chance to re-create their own book covers, and some even created their own pen name, similar to how Theodore Geisel called himself Dr Seuss. We also discovered more about cats in general and especially about big cats. We now know that leopards don’t like fish, and the students will remember for a long time the hilarious face the beast made when it was given some in the video we watched.

Finally, The Snail and the Whale brought back the author of our first story, Stick Man. The Snail and the Whale is a wonderful story about friendship and sharing that literally takes us all over the globe, from Scotland to Antarctica, all the way back to Indonesia and Canada. And just like the story’s characters‘ trip around the world is complete by the end of the story, our literature circle was complete too, as we got to use all the teachings covered over the past two months during our comprehension and writing activities.