The summer reading theme for CSLP libraries this year is One World, Many Stories, which is a graciously broad topic and easy to find themes for. I was really excited to plan a storytime featuring Brazil, partly because I love Nancy Van Laan's story So Say the Little Monkeys and partly because I just wanted to hang up beautiful pictures of Iguazzu Falls all over the meeting room.
Turns out I had a little trouble with Brazil. First, I decided that So Say the Little Monkeys was a little too young for my summertime target demographic, K-3rd grade. It worked well with pre-schoolers, but it felt like it would only work with older kids if I turned it into an action rhyme or something. So off I went to find other picture books about Brazil. I work for a suburban county library system with a pretty forceful weeding policy on aged and damaged books, and the branch that I work in is particularly draconian. Now fortunately our collections management people have kept us pretty well-stocked, but older books can sometimes be difficult to find. I managed to get the single copy of James the Vine Puller by Martha Bennett Stiles that our library has left. I looked at several non-fiction titles, which were far too long for read-alouds, and probably not very interesting besides. Eventually, I settled on Love and Roast Chicken by Barbara Knutson, which is actually set in the Andes, but I figured I had a little leeway.
So here is what I ended up with.
Story: James the Vine Puller, in which a clever turtle gets bullied by an elephant and whale, and then tricks them into playing tug-of-war with each other, both thinking they are battling against the little turtle. A nice trickster tale, although the action surrounding the old switcheroo might move a little too fast for the 5-6 year olds. It helped to use predictive reading and ask the kids what they thought James was going to do with the rope once he tied it to the elephant and the whale.
Song: O sapo não lava o pé
Words here. Video here.
An adorable song in Portuguese about a frog with dirty feet. One minor word of warning about this--Most of my kids wanted to sing this in English as well, and there is just not a translation that works with the melody.
Story: Love and Roast Chicken. Cuy the guinea pig is just trying to have a nice vegetarian snack when Tio Antonio the fox spies him and decides to make a meal out of Cuy. Then the quick-thinking guinea pig has to come up with numerous ways to escape the fox. But when the farmer catches Cuy eating his alfalfa, Cuy has to be more clever than ever to escape both the farmer and the fox.
Craft: Although we are seriously outside of the season for Carnival, I knew the kids would have fun making masks, so I used some of these templates from Activity Village. We had feathers and markers and sequins, and a great big mess!
Filler activity: How the Brazilian Beetles Got Their Beautiful Coats, a storytelling with stick puppets. I had planned for this to be an actual story for storytime, but there wasn't enough time for it. I used it for a group of day campers who had to wait for transportation at the library, and they seemed to enjoy it.
There are some wonderful photos on flickr with Creative Commons licenses of Brazilian wildlife. Try looking up jaguarundis, tamanduas, macaws, margays, sloths, coatis, caimans. For flora, look up pau brasil, ipe amarelo and pampas grass.
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