Grandpa Sydney's Anancy Stories @ Madie Ives Elementary

Over the next few days, I’ll be visiting Madie Ives Elementary to read from Grandpa Sydney’s Anancy Stories. I hope the children will fall in love with Jimmy, Grandpa Sydney, and Anancy as much as I have.

The Language Arts/Reading/ESOL teachers have chosen The Trickster Tricked (Creek/MusocqeeTribe) retold by S.E. Schlosser; Tops & Bottoms by Janet Stevens, and Grandpa Sydney’s Anancy stories to meet the Common Core State Standards Initiative within Miami Dade County Public Schools:

RL.2.1 – Ask and answer such questions as who, what, where, when, why and how, to demonstrated understanding of key details in a text.
RL.2.2 – Recount stories, including fables and folktales from diverse cultures, and determine their central message, or moral.
RL.2.3 – Describe how characters in a story respond to major events and challenges.
RL.2.4 – Describe how words and phrases (e.g., regular beats, alliteration, rhymes, repeated lines) supply rhythm and meaning in a story, poem, or song.
RL.2.5- Describe the overall structure of the story, including describing how the beginning introduces the story and the ending concludes the action.
RL.2.6 – Acknowledge differences in the points of view of characters, including by speaking in a different voice for each character when reading dialogue aloud.
RL.2.7 – Use information gained from the illustration and words in a print or digital text to demonstrate understanding of its characters, setting, or plot.
RL.2.10-By the end of the year, read and comprehend literature, including stories and poetry, in the grades 2-3 text complexity band proficiently, with scaffolding as needed at the high end of the range.

My presentation, Trickster Tales from the Caribbean, will cover literal, inferential, and analytical readings of Grandpa Sydney’s Anancy Stories, and Question Answer Relationships (QARs) within the text.

In addition, we’ll discuss the origins of Anancy stories and the counterparts in Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti, and the American South.

We’ll also examine the following elements of a Trickster tale and their relationship to “Anancy, Snake, and Tiger’:

A clever animal or person who plays a trick on other characters.
One of the characters has a problem to solve.
The trickster has one or two main characteristics such as greediness or boastfulness.
There is a moral or lesson to learn.

Of course, Grandpa Sydney’s Anancy Stories is a story within a story, so the children will also have another level of complexity when they compare Jimmy's serious need--to outsmart a bully-- and Anancy's in the story, “Anancy, Snake, and Tiger.” They’ll also compare the methods that Jimmy and Anancy used to achieve their goals and the lessons to be learned from their actions.

I think it’s going to be a lot of fun!