Over the last few weeks, we have been studying about folk tales. We got into four groups and each made up a name for the group. I was with Carley, Martin, Meri and finally, David (who came in to our group after few weeks later). We named our group "Marikarak" . We made this name by putting one part of everybody's name together.

Every language period ( almost every) we listened to a story from a tape, which professional folk tellers were reading, to learn how to listen.

In the first one or two weeks, we also read folk tales from all different parts of the world. Each person in the group had to read as much as possible during these weeks, but the stories had to be from a different part of the world which the other people in the group hadn't read. After you read the story, you had to write note, or draw pictures about the story. If you read five or more than five stories, you would get a "tale" and that would be a point for the group, but since I only read four stories, I didn't get a tale. We also put stickers on the world map on the region where the people in our group had read a story about, and tried to fill all the parts of the world.

Then when we were finished with this, we asked our parents to tell us a folk tale which they had been told as children. We were not allowed to take notes at the first stage, and when we were finished listening to the story , then we had to make notes.

The next thing we did was to write folk tales. The first we made one with the group. We started off discussing about how to begin, then place, time, plot and so on. Then we started writing. Because we thought that the folk tales shouldn't be long , we made a short story about a boy who was playing with his bouncing ball, and found rubber. (The Boy Who Made the First Erasure.)

When we were finished with the group folk tale, we had to make a folk tale of our own. I thought it was easier to write a story that started with "Why the .........". So, I wrote a story about an elephant who had wings and called the title," Why the elephants don't have wings"

At the last stage of this project, we had to tell the third graders a folk tale. Before we actually told the story to third graders, we practiced with another group from our class.. Everyone wrote grades about my story telling, and I scored most of them quite high but I had to practice on my voice expression. So I practiced on that at home and also talked slower. The next day each of us had to tell his story to a group of third graders. I didn't make any mistakes, and I spoke slower than before so they could follow me easily. It went well and I think I did good job too.

When I first came into the school the class was working on folk tales. They had been working on them for a while. The first thing I did was to make a folk tale with my group. We had to brainstorm for a while to come up with the title and the plot. We decided to call it "The Boy Who Made The First Eraser". We wrote the rough draft and then Akiko typed the final draft up on the computer.

We had been listening to folk tales on a cassette player for a while and it was time for us to make up our own individual folk tales. It was hard to think of an individual story that would be interesting and be long enough. I finally decided on a story, and it was called "Why The Moon Is So Far Away". I liked the story and created a rough and final draft for the story. Then we found out that we had to tell a story to Mrs. Bloemendaal's class. I chose to tell them my made up story. We had to practice it a lot because when we told it to them we couldn't look at the sheet , we had to have it memorized. We had to make a story vine that had clay models of objects that had to do with our story. I had to paint them and tie them on a string, twine, yarn, etc. When we finally had the vines made and the stories ready to tell, we told it to the 3rd graders. They enjoyed the stories and it was fun telling the stories to them.

The part I liked best about the unit was making the story line and telling the story to the 3rd graders, it was really fun and exciting. The part I liked least about the unit was having to read your story over and over again so that you could memorize it. It got a little boring after a while.

Our group worked really well together. We all worked together and we didn't get mad at each other. I liked being in the group with the rest of the kids. Everybody did something in the group so the jobs were split up.