Picture book-A child’s garden

A child’s garden–story of hope (by Michal Foreman)

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The main character of this book is a Jewish boy who was constrained by a fence of barded wire. The boy found a tiny plant in a place of rubble and ruin after a night of rain. With tender care from the boy, the tiny plant, which turned out to be a grapevine, grow into a garden. However, soldiers came and destroyed everything, including the boy’s heart. Then in the next spring, small shoots were spotted both outside and inside the fence, which later entwined together and grew into a even more spectacular garden. The boy was not scared of the solders any more because he knew roots are deep and seeds spread.

As the subtitle indicates, this is a story of hope, which carries the message that plants can be destroyed, people can be killed, but hope still exists. The most striking feature of this book is contradiction of colors. As you can see from the cover, everything inside the fence is black and white, except the plant and bird, which are contrastively colorful. Such contrast is even shown on the same subject, like the grapevine shown in the following picture. Paying closer attention, you will find that everything to do with Nazi is black and while, not only the ruins, fence, soldiers, but also the destroyed plant and confined children, while those having nothing to do with it is colorful. Therefore, dull colors in the book symbolize  cruelty and destruction, while bright colors are emblems of hope and freedom.

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Materials for teaching vocabulary

  1. The song “We All Fall Down ” is helpful for teaching different verbs for “walk”, including walk, gallop, tiptoe, hop and twirl. It can also  be developed to teach other vocabularies that fall into the same group.

 

2. A song-The Grand Old Duke of York which can also be performed with actions in a circle. The song is targeted at vocabularies showing directions: up, down, halfway up.

 

3.

Welcome to my blog

I’m chanjuan, once a teacher, now a student again.  I enjoy the hard-gained campus life after striving for recognition from others in the workforce. Always curious to explore the unknown world, I feel greatly inspired and energetic when I find something new or achieve what was thought impossible. Thanks to the course “Online Language Learning”, I feel a part of the digital world^_^. This blog will be dedicated to materials I find useful for teaching language and it’s a space for sharing as well.

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