Posted By: Amanda Horner
Posted On: January 12, 2020
Amanda H
4th Grade-MVE
Get pulled into the Chinese culture through Mingmei Yip’s book, “Chinese Children’s Favorite Stories”. This book a collection of thirteen tales that she was told as a young child. The stories are only a few pages long with bright and detailed illustrations. Morals are taught through talking animals, emperors, goddesses, and much more in this book fit for all ages.
This would be a great book to introduce Chinese culture into the classroom. A lot of the animals in the stories are important to Chinese culture, such as the monkey, the illustrations show authentic Chinese-style drawings, and within the drawings you will discover beautiful landscapes, colorful dragons, and even traditional clothing.
In our reading series we focus a lot on theme, main idea, character traits, and types of texts such as folk tales. This would be a perfect way to incorporate all of those things. Since there are thirteen stories, I may read one a day and have the students dig deep into each story by having them help figure out the main idea of each story, the character traits we read of and infer, as well as the theme. The theme would really be my main focus since all of these stories help teach lessons to educate children to cultivate moral wisdom and to do good deeds. After we had read the entire book, I would have the students compare and contrast some of our traditional folktales to those in Mingmei’s book. The students could complete a graphic organizer (Venn Diagram) then use that information to write a paragraph(s) about the similarities and differences of not only the folk tales, but the culture as well.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn more about and share the Chinese culture.