Wow Rocío! Millions of thanks for your AMAZING comment!  I even don’t know how to start answering you because I agree with you in thousand of things! I will try to go little by little 
Firstly, I couldn’t agree with you more in the fact that introducing international, and not just national authors, has an amazing number of advantages, as allowing/helping students to be open-minded in relation with other and different cultures.

You are also absolutely right, when you say that “the more you get deeper in the whole reading world, the more you love reading”. In fact, I could experience so a few days ago, when we presented our authors to the rest of the class. Lots of them really piques my curiosity.

Furthermore, I would like to tell you that although I didn’t have the chance to study the subject you mentioned, because of the wonderful things you say about it, I think that if I had had the opportunity of studying it I would have loved it too.

According with the way of dealing with it, as I was saying to Paula in a few lines above, sometimes first impressions have a strong influence on us, and because this work has a very special meaning for me (my grandfather introduced it to me), I thought a lot about an appropriate and successful way of presenting it to the pupils.

On the other hand, it is true! I didn’t think about the similarity with Shrek until you told me, and the truth is that you are totally right! They share lots of similarities! And I consider that it would be fantastic to show this link to the pupils in order to make them fell more motivated and interested about it.

Finally, many thanks for sharing your great experience about creating books in a library! I think that it could be a fantastic activity which in fact is not very difficult to prepare and carry out, so teachers and future teachers… you do not have excuses for not using it! 

I would like to tell you that I totally agree with your idea of introducing not just the national authors, but also the authors and works of all around the world and belonging to different historical times; especially to promote the reading at school, as I consider that the more you get deeper in the whole reading world, the more you love reading.
Based on my experience, I had the great chance of studying Universal Literature in my highschool and, sincerely, I wish I would have studied those contents before in my life. Along the year, we learnt about the different epochs, their characteristics, and their representative authors, going deeper in their personal life and experiences, their works, etc. and, sometimes, we analysed a text written by them to find the hidden purpose they were trying to transmit and how the author expressed it through their way of writing and the use of different literary resources (which were normally those corresponding to the epoch). So, each lesson opened me a wider range of opportunities to discover and enjoy the authors, their surprising lives and the characters and interesting stories of their books; and I am sure that every kid would love to enjoy the learning of them too.

On the other hand, regarding the project you developed, I would like to tell you that I love it and that I am sure that the students learnt and enjoyed a lot. You presented the contents in a very visually attractive way and perfectly adapted to their age with a good summary, highlighting the key ideas about Cervantes and Don Quixote.
I consider that every literary work, even from Classical Literature, can be offered to children. For example, if we analyse Don Quixote, it is a book about the crazy adventures of a knight, accompanied by a fun character, Sancho Panza, and who is in love with a special lady. This is very similar to other children stories such as Shrek, isn’t it?…
Then, as you did, and what we, as teachers, should do is finding a good way to let the students meet the authors and works by adapting them to the kids’ age; so that they can enter many worlds and enjoy thousands of stories, at the same time they learn from the historical epoques and the authors’ life. Moreover, the students can realise that every author was a normal person like them who decided to use their imagination and creativity to write adventures; concluding that everybody can be part of Literature with a bit of positive attitude and inspiration.

Finally, and related to this last idea of becoming authors, I would like to emphasise the activity of creating their own book. As I explain some weeks before in my post, when I was a child I used to go to the library where we carried out a game of producing books by playing with single worlds and creating a story. I believe that both your activity and the one I played at the library are great for the promotion of reading, and also for fostering creativity, working in groups and other social abilities, linguistic and artistic skills, and furthermore the satisfaction of having your own book “published” and read by other people.

Thank your for sharing your great project with us!

I completely agree with you, that probably making them looking for information about the Quixote and Cervantes, will motivate them a little bit more; however I´m sure they were so involved to create new adventures for don Quixote and Sancho Panza and the book looks very nice.

Another option of presenting the author and its work it could have been by “sending” them a letter from Cervantes and creating a little box with some objects and materials to use in the presentation and in the different activities you develop in class. I know that this it´s a bit difficult because probably you don´t arranged for materials to fill the box but you could also tell them that to reply Cervantes they should create for example a sword, a shield and some other materials that don Quixote uses and also he wears.

To finish, I would like to say thanks to you because you gave great ideas to present authors and their works to our future students.