南投的好地方~ Jodie英文繪本故事屋

Equipped myself with a headphone set and a smile and confidence, I began telling my first story "What Color is Your Underwear?" This time, I learned to slow down my pace and added the recall time after finishing the story. It worked! While slowing down my pace of storytelling, I relaxed bit by bit and immersed in children's anticipation and laughter. Kids made predictions of the colors of underwears the animals would wear. And they loved to come to the front, lifted up the flip-up and found out the color of the underwear the animal put on. This is an intriguing book, I would say. I don't need to ask the children whether they like the book. It's all written on their faces. The funny part of the story was that the elephonat forgot to put his underwear on. I paused and tried to induce children's experiences of running around places with and without the underwear on. One of the girl told us her mother once went shopping with underwear on. You will never know what kids are going to say.

The second story "The Grouchy Ladybug" was a longer one. Like I had expected, some of kids learned to say the lines of the grouchy ladybug "Hey you, want to fight?" "No, you are not big enough." I was a sweaty and exuberant storyteller when I presented this story. Oh, and the girl whose mother went shopping with her underwear on was impatient when I gave examples of a grouchy kid would do. Maybe she could not wait to hear out the story?!

The two books are all written in English. One of the boys pointed it out before I shared the stories. Nevertheless, none of the kids whined about the diffuculty or the  infamiliarity of the English-written storybooks. I found it surprising. This confirmed Ms Wong' s (author of 培養孩子的英文耳朵) viewpoint of increasing children's listening and speaking abilities by reading or telling children stories that amused them. Ms Wong stated in her book that the motivation of keeping children lisenting to storytellers was the storybook itself. And whild children were drawn to the story, it was the perfect timing of introducing a foreign language (English) to children!!

It was 11 o'clock sharp when I finished the second story (Good timing!). (When I announed that it was 11 that the storytime was up. The boy who firstly noticed the English-written storybooks shouted out "eleven, e-l-e-v-e-n." Ha, funny.) Role play was not going to happen today. The animals props I brought along were quietly sitting in my big bag. Maybe next time!!

Oh, and the picture you see above is the refined version of the whale. Hero made this for me at 1 A.M. right after the football game.  (Milco and Taco were toying with it while I was taking the pictures.)