Discovering Chapter 21 in The Little Prince

Book Club participants work on creating a sketch based on Chapter 21 in The Little Prince, where little prince meets the wise fox and learns about friendship and love. The sketch will be filmed and shown to the wider AES audience.

Creating a plot for the sketch

Creating dialogues for the sketch

Creating dialogues for the sketch

Launching of the AES Book Club

The Book Club is going very well, and… very different to what I had planned initially. In fact, it is moving very much away from what we know to be a traditional gathering around a book. Yes, still a book constitutes the center of our learning (now: The Little Prince), but it’s only an incentive to wider explore its themes and discuss them in connection to students’ lives. 

One of The Little Prince’s main themes is friendship and love. Students explore these themes while filming and acting. Of course, we do read, but only the most important fragments. Working on meaningful fragments is a great way to explore a book. Really, not the whole book has to be read. It’s about getting a student interested in a book rather than making him or her read it in full. The Book Club… what fun!

Chapter XXI - one of the most significant, where little prince meets the fox

"To you, I am just a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, we shall need one another. To me, you will be unique. And I shall be unique to you," said the fox (quote from chapter XXI).

Reading aloud in classroom

Reading out loud is still a great teaching tool

For quite some time now, I have wanted to familiarize myself with the famous Spanish novel Adventures of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. So far, unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to dedicate enough time to this literary masterpiece. Until today… - a day filled with substitutions. As I got to know about these unexpected lessons at the last moment (it’s usually so with substitutions), I decided to use them to introduce students, and myself at the same time, to this fascinating novel and character of Don Quixote. 

Don Quixote by a French artist Honore Daumier (1870)

Today’s classes became an occasion to see whether students like being read to. In each class (grades 4^th to 6^th), I read Don Quixote aloud (a version retold by experts) for over twenty minutes. Again, my conclusion is that students enjoy listening to someone reading out loud and that it enhances their concentration skills. It is also a calming and soothing exercise that in an unobtrusive way spurs students’ imagination. Reading aloud is creative and has no limits - a teacher can use this method in any situation, like an unexpected substitution. 

MS