English Children's Literature week 11

• To kill a mockingbird

  

To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel by Harper Lee published in 1960. It was immediately successful, winning the Pulitzer Prize, and has become a classic of modern American literature. The plot and characters are loosely based on the author's observations of her family and neighbors, as well as on an event that occurred near her hometown in 1936, when she was 10 years old.

The novel is renowned for its warmth and humor, despite dealing with the serious issues of rape and racial inequality. The narrator's father, Atticus Finch, has served as a moral hero for many readers and as a model of integrity for lawyers. One critic explains the novel's impact by writing, "In the twentieth century, To Kill a Mockingbird is probably the most widely read book dealing with race in America, and its protagonist, Atticus Finch, the most enduring fictional image of racial heroism."

As a Southern Gothic novel and a Bildungsroman, the primary themes of To Kill a Mockingbird involve racial injustice and the destruction of innocence. Scholars have noted that Lee also addresses issues of class, courage, compassion, and gender roles in the American Deep South. The book is widely taught in schools in the United States with lessons that emphasize tolerance and decry prejudice. Despite its themes, To Kill a Mockingbird has been subject to campaigns for removal from public classrooms, often challenged for its use of racial epithets.

• Superstition

Superstition is the belief in supernatural causality—that one event causes another without any natural process linking the two events—such as astrology and religions, like omens, witchcraft, and prophecies, that contradict natural science.

The word superstition is generally used to refer to the religion not practiced by the majority of a given society – such as Christianity in Western culture – regardless of whether the prevailing religion contains superstitions. It is also commonly applied to beliefs and practices surrounding luck, prophecy, and certain spiritual beings, particularly the belief that future events can be foretold by specific (apparently) unrelated prior events.

• Godiva Chocolatier

  

Godiva Chocolatier is a manufacturer of premium fine chocolates and related products. Godiva, founded in Belgium in 1926, was purchased by the Turkish Yıldız Holding, owner of the Ülker Group, on November 20, 2007. Godiva owns and operates more than 600 retail boutiques and shops in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia and is available via over 10,000 speciality retailers.

• Lady Godiva

  

Godiva, Countess of Mercia, in Old English Godgifu, was an English noblewoman who, according to a legend dating at least to the 13th century, rode naked – covered only in her long hair – through the streets of Coventry to gain a remission of the oppressive taxation that her husband imposed on his tenants. The name "Peeping Tom" for a voyeur originates from later versions of this legend in which a man named Tom watched her ride and was struck blind or dead.

• Peeping Tom(偷窺者)

  

The story of "Peeping Tom", who alone among the townsfolk spied on the Lady Godiva's naked ride, probably did not originate in literature, but came about through popular lore in the locality of Coventry. Reference by 17th-century chroniclers has been claimed, but all the published accounts are 18th-century or later.

• Doubting Thomas

  

A doubting Thomas is a skeptic who refuses to believe without direct personal experience—a reference to the Apostle Thomas, who refused to believe that the resurrected Jesus had appeared to the ten other apostles, until he could see and feel the wounds received by Jesus on the cross.

In art, the episode (formally called the Incredulity of Thomas) has been frequently depicted since at least the 5th century, with its depiction reflecting a range of theological interpretations.

• Vocabularies

Respectively	used for saying that something happens separately to each of the people or things mentioned in the order in which they were mentioned
Respectful	feeling or showing respect

Malevolent	showing that you want to do something bad to someone
Benevolent	willing to help and be generous towards people
Intention	a plan in your mind to do something

Malicious	unkind and showing a strong feeling of wanting to hurt someone
Malicious gossip	Disgraceful gossip about the private lives of others

Benefit	an advantage you get from a situation
Beneficiary	someone who gets money or other things from someone who has died

Ex-	1.      Out 2.      Used with nouns that describe someone’s job, rank, or relationship to someone, for showing that they no longer have that job, rank, or relationship
Exclude	to deliberately not include something e.g. These figures exclude cash receipts

English Children's Literature week10

• Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears

Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears: A West African Tale is a picture book by Verna Aardema and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon told in the form of a cumulative tale written for young children, which tells an African legend. In this origin story, the mosquito lies to a lizard, who puts sticks in his ears and ends up frightening another animal, which down a long line causes a panic. In the end, an owlet is killed and the owl is too sad to wake the sun until the animals hold court and find out who is responsible. The mosquito is eventually found out, but it hides in order to escape punishment. So now it constantly buzzes in people's ears to find out if everyone is still angry at it. The book won a Caldecott Medal in 1976 for the Dillons.

Cause and effect

This story is a resource for teachers to teach the skill cause and effect: "A cause is something that makes something else happen; An effect is what happens as a result of the cause"

• Best of coyote & roadrunner
  

  

Wile E. Coyote and The Road Runner

Wile E. Coyote (also known simply as "The Coyote") and The Road Runner are a duo of characters from the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons. In the cartoons, Coyote repeatedly attempts to catch and subsequently eat the Road Runner, a fast-running ground bird, but is never successful. Coyote, instead of his species' animal instincts, uses absurdly complex contraptions (sometimes in the manner of Rube Goldberg) and elaborate plans to pursue his prey, which always comically backfire with Wile normally getting injured by the slapstick humor. The characters were created by animation director Chuck Jones in 1948 for Warner Bros., while the template for their adventures was the work of writer Michael Maltese. The characters star in a long-running series of theatrical cartoon shorts and occasional made-for-television cartoons. It was originally meant to parody chase cartoons like Tom and Jerry, but became popular in its own right.

Creation

Jones based the Coyote on Mark Twain's book Roughing It, in which Twain described the coyote as "a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton" that is "a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry." Jones said he created the Coyote-Road Runner cartoons as a parody of traditional "cat and mouse" cartoons such as MGM's Tom and Jerry, which Jones would work on as a director later in his career. Jones modelled the Coyote's appearance on fellow animator Ken Harris.[8] The Coyote's name of Wile E. is a pun of the word "wily." The "E" was said to stand for Ethelbert in one issue of a Looney Tunes comic book, but its writer had not intended it to be canon.

• Mark twin

  

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher and lecturer. Among his novels are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called "The Great American Novel".

Twain was raised in Hannibal, Missouri, which later provided the setting for Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

Though Twain earned a great deal of money from his writings and lectures, he invested in ventures that lost a great deal of money, notably the Paige Compositor, a mechanical typesetter, which failed because of its complexity and imprecision. In the wake of these financial setbacks, he filed for protection from his creditors via bankruptcy, and with the help of Henry Huttleston Rogers eventually overcame his financial troubles. Twain chose to pay all his pre-bankruptcy creditors in full, though he had no legal responsibility to do so.

Twain was born shortly after a visit by Halley's Comet, and he predicted that he would "go out with it", too. He died the day after the comet returned. He was lauded as the "greatest American humorist of his age", and William Faulkner called Twain "the father of American literature".

• Hoosiers

  

Hoosiers is a 1986 sports film written by Angelo Pizzo and directed by David Anspaugh. It tells the story of a small-town Indiana high school basketball team that wins the state championship. It is loosely based on the Milan High School team that won the 1954 state championship. Gene Hackman stars as Norman Dale, a new coach with a spotty past. The film co-stars Barbara Hershey and Dennis Hopper, whose role as the basketball-loving town drunk, earned him an Oscar nomination. Jerry Goldsmith was also nominated for an Academy Award for his score. In 2001, Hoosiers was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
  

  

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (or, in more recent editions, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) is a novel by Mark Twain, first published in the United Kingdom in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885. Commonly named among the Great American Novels, the work is among the first in major American literature to be written throughout in vernacular English, characterized by local color regionalism. It is told in the first person by Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, a friend of Tom Sawyer and narrator of two other Twain novels (Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective). It is a direct sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

The book is noted for its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River. Set in a Southern antebellum society that had ceased to exist about 20 years before the work was published, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an often scathing satire on entrenched attitudes, particularly racism.

Perennially popular with readers, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has also been the continued object of study by literary critics since its publication. It was criticized upon release because of its coarse language and became even more controversial in the 20th century because of its perceived use of racial stereotypes and because of its frequent use of the racial slur "nigger", despite arguments that the protagonist and the tenor of the book are anti-racist.

Characters

Huckleberry Finn is a boy about thirteen or fourteen years old. He has been brought up by his father, the town drunk, and has a difficult time fitting into society. Widow Douglas is the kind woman who has taken Huck in after he helped save her from a violent home invasion. She tries her best to civilize Huck, believing it is her Christian duty. Miss Watson is the widow's sister, a tough old spinster who also lives with them. She is fairly hard on Huck, causing him to resent her a good deal. Jim is Miss Watson's physically large but mild-mannered slave. Huck becomes very close to Jim when they reunite after Jim flees Miss Watson's household to seek refuge from slavery, and Huck and Jim become fellow travelers on the Mississippi River.

Major themes

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn explores themes of race and identity. A complexity exists concerning Jim's character. While some scholars point out that Jim is good-hearted, moral, and he is not unintelligent, others have criticized the novel as racist, citing the use of the word "nigger" and emphasizing the stereotypically "comic" treatment of Jim's lack of education, superstition and ignorance. To highlight the hypocrisy required to condone slavery within an ostensibly moral system, Twain has Huck's father enslave his son, isolate him, and beat him. When Huck escapes – which anyone would agree was the right thing to do – he then immediately encounters Jim "illegally" doing the same thing. The treatment both of them receive are radically different especially with an encounter with Mrs. Judith Loftus who takes pity on who she presumes to be a run away apprentice, Huck, yet boasts about her husband sending the hounds after a run-away slave, Jim

English Children's Literature week 9

• Midterm

  

A term is a period of duration, time or occurrence, in relation to an event. To differentiate an interval or duration, common phrases are used to distinguish the observance of length are near-term or short-term, medium-term or mid-term and long-term. It is also used as part of a calendar year, especially one of the three parts of an academic term and working year in the United Kingdom. In America there is a midterm election held in the middle of the four-year presidential term, there are also academic midterm exams.

English Children's Literature week 8

• Video ( Richard Scarry's Best Sing Along Mother Goose Video Ever! )

Keep asking questions

Who is Lowly?

Where can I find it?

• Nursery rhyme

Nursery rhyme	A nursery rhyme is a traditional poem or song for children in Britain and many other countries, but usage of the term only dates from the late 18th/early 19th century. In North America the term Mother Goose Rhymes, introduced in the mid-18th century, is still often used.
Baa, Baa, Black Sheep	Baa, baa, black sheep, Have you any wool? Yes, sir, yes, sir, Three bags full; One for the master, And one for the dame, And one for the little boy Who lives down the lane
Doctor Foster	Doctor Foster went to Gloucester, In a shower of rain; He stepped in a puddle, Right up to his middle, And never went there again.[
Humpty Dumpty	Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king's horses and all the king's men Couldn't put Humpty together again
Jack and Jill	Jack and Jill went up the hill To fetch a pail of water . Jack fell down and broke his crown, And Jill came tumbling after
Little Boy Blue	Little Boy Blue, Come blow your horn, The sheep's in the meadow, The cow's in the corn; But where is the boy Who looks after the sheep? He's under a haystack, He's fast asleep. Will you wake him? No, not I, For if I do, He's sure to cry.
London Bridge Is Falling Down	London Bridge is falling down, Falling down, falling down. London Bridge is falling down, My fair lady
Mary Had a Little Lamb	Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb, Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow. And everywhere that Mary went Mary went, Mary went, everywhere that Mary went The lamb was sure to go.
Who Killed Cock Robin	Who killed Cock Robin? I, said the Sparrow, with my bow and arrow, I killed Cock Robin.

• Hickory Dickory Dock

Hickory Dickory Dock	Hickory, dickory, dock. The mouse ran up the clock. The clock struck one, The mouse ran down, Hickory, dickory, dock.
Origins and meaning	The earliest recorded version of the rhyme is in Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book, published in London in about 1744, which uses the opening line: 'Hickere, Dickere Dock'. The next recorded version in Mother Goose's Melody (c. 1765), uses 'Dickery, Dickery Dock'

• Video

Vocabularies (adv.)

Definitely: without any doubt

Precisely: exactly

Exactly:  no more and no less than a particular amount or time