This week, we had the opportunity to introduce, and be introduced, to some of the most relevant authors related to Children’s Literature in English. For our teacher, there were different ways to do it, including from handing us the most rigurous classnotes including hundreds of data impossible to memorize, to making us take an active role in our learning experience, and present the authors ourselves to our peers. And guess what? She chose the latter.
That is why we had to work in groups of three people, in most cases with those who, for any reason, we hadn’t had the chance to do it before, and prepare a 5-minute presentation to try and convince our classmates that the author we had become experts in (or kind of), deserved to be chosen as the most relevant in Children’s Literature.
It must be said that I wasn’t aware of the exciting life that most of them had/are having, and I am truly convinced that Roald Dahl, which was the one that my group was in charge of presenting (thanks Ali and Carmen!), should be at the very top of that list. Not only was he a writer, but also a pilot and even a spy. Moreover, his strong desire to help his children, made him design a valve to solve one of his son’s medical conditions… He was a truly interesting man.
Anyway, is it enough (having an exciting life, I mean) to be considered as the best author? Probably not, but if you scratch a little bit, you will find that he won not only some of the most important prizes regarding Children Literature, but also gained the respect of his profession. Not everybody can say that there is a prize named after them, nor a Museum devoted to his works.
Nevertheless, every minute of the presentations was worthy, because the other groups did a great work introducing David Shannon and his No, David!, Eric Carle and The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Julia Donaldson and The Gruffalo, Maurice Sendak with Where The Wild Things Are, Marc Brown and his aardvark Arthur, Dr. Seuss and The Grinch, or E.B. White with Stuart Little. And there are more yet to be presented.
I guess that next time I go to a bookshop, I will look at the Children’s Literature shelves with more acknowledging eyes.
Hi Loli!
I enjoyed a lot your post because it is a good summary of many presentations and what happened that day in class, and as you said “every minute of the presentation was worthy”.
I have to admit that I never heard about Roald Dahl, but I saw the movies “Matilda” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, so maybe I have to watch movies in another way to pay attention to who wrote that story.
My writer was E.B. White and, as you said, he wrote Stuart Little, but as your writer, he also has a prize named after his dead, so it reflects that those writers are so important for children’s literature and we have to keep them in our mind because can teach a lot of things to children that we can’t do as teachers, because the world of imagination was endless.
I know that we have to vote about what author is the best one, but I think the best part of the activity has been done yet: learn about 10 different authors of children’s literature and reflect about why they wrote that stories, because I’m sure that almost every of us were surprised about it with some authors.
Hi Jaime,
First of all, thanks for taking the time to read my post and leave me a comment
I consider that the prize of the class, instead of being for one of the authors, it has been for all of us, who had the chance to know a little bit more about the top ten of the Children’s Literature.
And it’s true, I was surprised by most of their stories! and not only the fictional ones, but their personal lives also. What a great project we had.