That's the Cutest Ugly Animal Ever!

In real life hyenas are U-G-L-Y, and they certainly ain't got no alibi. Remember the hyena in Life of Pi? Monster! Or the ones in The Lion King? Bad minions! So, when we first picked up this book, we really didn't know the animal on the cover was a hyena. And then we read the book and it all makes sense: beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and do unto others as you would have them do unto you. So, since we don't want hyenas making fun of our appearances, we won't make fun of them. We're all God's creatures here. (But seriously, look at these guys!)




The baby is kind of cute, though.
And the baby is the inspiration for our story today: Pinduli, by Janell Cannon, author of Stellaluna. In the story Pinduli doesn't have a problem with herself until she runs into some other animals who tease her about her appearance.

At the beginning of the story, Pinduli (isn't she adorable?) and Mama Hyena are having a hard time finding food. They are separated in their hunt, and Pinduli comes across different animals. She meets a pack of wild dogs, a lion, and a zebra, and each make fun of her appearance: her ears, her stripes, and her tail. She becomes very self-conscious, so she tucks her ears and tail in and rolls in the dirt until her striped coat is a pallid gray. As she shame-facedly makes her way home to Mama Hyena, she runs into the animals that made fun of her. The animals think that she is a ghost that has come to punish them, so Pinduli toys with them. All of the creatures confess that they teased the young hyena because another animal had made fun of them. Pinduli understands their motives and advises them to "find your tormentors and make peace," She also tells them they should always leave a bit of every meal as an offering to the ghost. By the end of the story, the animals are reconciled and with all the food offerings left for the "ghost," Pinduli and her mother no longer have to scrounge for food.

Aside from the character building that could come from this story, there are many opportunities to teach students how to visualize, or how to see the story in their minds using their own imagination. This is an important reading strategy that greatly improves reading comprehension. Imagine the lovely pictures students could form in their minds with text like this from Pinduli: "The sun was low in the East African sky. The animals had been sleeping all through the hot afternoon, and now they begin to stir." There are many pre-reading and post-reading tasks to practice visualization:

• Take notes to draw their own pictures of what they think the scenes looked like after the read-aloud (would also teach to pay attention to details in the text). See example worksheet below.
• Have discussions with a partner or as a class of what Pinduli looked like when her feelings and appearances were changed
• Draw a sequence of events through their visualizations. See example below.
• Discuss what the landscape of Africa looks like where Pinduli hunts
• Write a narrative with a picture of something they visualized explaining why they visualized this, what details in the text made them visualize what they did, and what does their visualization tell them about the characters, themes, or main ideas
• Copying a passage of a story onto big paper and explicitly showing children what words trigger visualization is a wonderful idea we found on Pinterest (of course!), example below.

 

This story may need some background information because of some vocabulary that students may not be familiar with or animals they may never have seen before. In order to visualize to the greatest extent, students should know what words and animals are in the story. Of course, there are many other ideas for teaching and developing visualization skills, but these were some of our favorites. Again, if you enjoy the story of Stellaluna, you will no doubt enjoy what Pinduli has to offer. Just remember: real striped hyenas are not as cute as Pinduli. She is the cutest ugly animal you'll ever see.

Alternative Points of View & Making Inferences

Hello, readers! This week we're talking about a reading strategy called making inferences. It's where students learn to assume, or infer, things from the text that may not be explicitly written. This happens a lot when an event happens in a story and the characters who have been affected act in a certain way, like if a child slams the door shut after a fight with his or her siblings. In that instance, we can infer that the child is angry. In class this past week, we watched a read-aloud of a wonderful book called Knots on a Counting Rope; it was only close to the end of the book that we realized the child narrating part of the story was blind! He described how he saw darkness and he asked what blue was, so that's when many of us in class finally connected the dots.

There are actually a lot of books out there that are wonderful for teaching students how to make inferences.

One that we found and were really enchanted by was Encounter, by Jane Yolen. Not only are the illustrations beautiful and, again, just enchanting, the author uses wonderful, mysterious descriptions. The book is about when Christopher Columbus and his entourage landed in San Salvador in 1492. Far from the positive rhyme "In fourteen hundred ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue," this story actually isn't about Columbus and it ends on a melancholy note. The story is about the natives on San Salvador and it is told by a young boy. The boy has a dream warning him that something bad is about to happen, and he tries to warn the rest of the villagers when he sees the signs that his nightmare is coming true. They ignore him because he is a child, but he continues to try to save his people. As we know from history, in the end the natives are forced to adopt European ways, including customs, clothes, religion, and more and the explorers take all the gold they can carry.

That sounds like a sad, lame book for a classroom read-aloud, right? Wrong!

Look at these descriptions of the explorers and their belongings from the point of view of the boy. Remember, he has never seen these people or the objects they brought with them. See if you can guess what the boy is describing - some are objects and some are thoughts.
1. "The hand [of the man] felt like flesh and blood, but the skin was moon to my sun."
2. "...I watched how the sky strangers touched our golden nose rings and our golden armbands but not the flesh of our faces or arms. I watched their chief smile. It was the serpent's smile - no lips and all teeth."
3. "They (the natives) desired all that the strangers had brought: the sharp silver spear; round pools to hold in the hand that gave a man back his face; darts that sprang from sticks with a sound like thunder that could kill a parrot many paces away."

So what do you think?

1. The boy is describing his dark skin compared to the stranger's white skin.
2. The boy realizes the strangers want gold and not to be friends with the natives. The serpent's smile is cunning, tricking, and dangerous.
3. The boy describes a sword, a mirror, and a gun.


Of course, many of the illustrations in the book help show what the boy is talking about. As a lesson in making inferences, though, during a read aloud a teacher could wait to show the illustrations until she was done reading the text on each page. The teacher would get the students to think about the descriptions and make inferences about what they mean. In this story, there are different emotions the boy implicitly expresses that would provide for beneficial discussions. We found this idea on Pinterest and loved it: having students write a narrative with descriptions of objects like the boy did in the story and then displaying them. It would also be fun to allow students to read each other's narratives, or to have a show and tell time where students could read their narratives to the class.

What we enjoy about this book is that, like Knots on a Counting Rope, it's a serious book. It would be great for Columbus Day of course, but also for standards teaching about the New World and exploration in world history. It's important to try to understand other people's point of view, and since we learn in American history that Columbus was a neat explorer who helped discover our country, we tend to think highly and positively of him. In this story as we read the boy's point of view, we see the greedy motive and lust for power in the explorers - far from the good image of them that we grew up with.  
There is a video on YouTube about Encounter; it is a trailer of the book and could be used as a preview or a review, depending on the lesson. It also points out the importance of seeing stories and history from various points of view and not only our own. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch/?v=01SKUjCCVGU