Two boys are ordered by the king to answer a riddle of what fills a hand fuller than gold? If they do not figure out the answer within seven days they will be killed. A nursemaid, formerly to the queen's child explains to them that the banished queen can help. They are pursued by Great Barons, the greedy King's Grip, an individual that tells a story of a man who can spin straw into gold, yet disappeared with her firstborn son. One of the boys, Tousle knows the man spoken of, and one them may be the prince. This adventure reveals a story of what may have happened before the queen made her last guess out of three, and Rumplestiltskin, as we know it ends (Schmidt, 2001).
The story follows quality in folklore as it "Echoes spoken language, with rich, natural rhythms, Reflects the cultural integrity of early retellings, Preserves the straightforward structure of oral stories; and explores significant universal themes (Schmidt, 2001, pg. 178). There are no illustrations inside the novel.
Questions I would have the children answer would include deciphering what the genre of the novel is, what are the goals brought by reading this book; and what do they anticipate are the goals of the main characters as they figure out the riddle? Response-centered project ideas would include a comparison paper, where they would read a different variation of Rumplestiltskin and then compare the two in an essay, while analyzing the genre, content, style, and structure of the two books (Galda, Cullinan, & Sipe, 2010, pg. 351).
I would recommend this version of Rumplestiltkin for all those who enjoy folklore and enjoy differing variations of this story.
References
Galda, L., Cullinan, B. E., & Sipe, L. R. (2010). Literature
and the Child. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cenage Learning.
Schmidt, G. D. (2001). Straw into Gold. New
York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
No comments:
Post a Comment