Animal Stories from India: Styles Brainstorming

Topic: My Storybook/Portfolio will be about animal stories for children from India.  My goal is to find four different animals that have the ability to teach four different life lessons.  One story I might use is “How the Turtle Saved His Own Life” and another story I might use is “The Girl Monkey and the String of Pearls”.   I do not think I will have any trouble finding stories about different animals.  This only problem I run into is that there are so many different stories, so I will need to focus on those stories that lead into important lessons. 

(Narrative Animals) 

Bibliography:

1. “How the Turtle Saved His Own Life”, Part of the Jataka Tales unit, with story source: Jataka Tales by Ellen C. Babbitt, Illustrated by Ellsworth Young (1912)

2. “The Girl Monkey and the String of Pearls”, Part of the Jataka Tales unit, with story source: Jataka Tales by Ellen C. Babbitt, Illustrated by Ellsworth Young (1922)

In general, the Unit Jataka (Babbitt) will be where I am getting all of my stories. 

Possible Styles:

Animals as Storytellers:  This is a logical choice for my Storybook/Portfolio; I definitely want to have the animals be the storytellers.  Each story will have an animal that acts as the storyteller in first person.  This will allow me to be creative with the animals on how I want their personalities to be like. 

Bedtime Story: Since I am interested in learning lessons, or pulling some sort of lesson from the animals in the story these could be great for bedtime stories.  Most of these stories are aimed towards children in the first place, so it could be fun to incorporate that into bedtime stories. 

Therapy Session: I can see how making these stories into some type of therapy, for the animals in the story and the readers.  I could changes these stories around that reflect real life situations so that those reading them are learning how to deal with different situations through how the animals learn in the story.  So basically the reader would be learning from the animal in the story. 

Sleepover: I think that this would be a really fun way to tell the stories in.  Putting them in a setting for a group of young minded girls to tell could get really interesting.  Being a girl myself I know how creative little girls get at sleepover, especially when it is way past normal bedtime, and the silly giggles come out to play.