benizara and kakezara

A silk kimono!

Kimono to please the King,

Kind box of magic,

You are the key, make it so,

A silk and brocade kimono.

-from "Benizara and Kakezara", a Japanese Fairy Tale adapted by Enki Education

This week's curriculum story was the Japanese fairy tale "Benizara and Kakezara", which is a Cinderella type story. In the story, Benizara, the stepdaughter, wins the heart of the King with her superior poetry writing skills, and the help of a magic box. Here's J's story drawing, showing his own inventive spelling of Kakezara's name, and indicating with a heart after Benizara's name that she was the one who found her love, and a broken heart after Kakezara's to show that she didn't. I'm sure everyone can see the "K" in the drawing, which was the consonant we were introducing.

Zoo Boy's drawing. This story actually had an extremely violent ending, but I just cut out most of the last paragraph to make it a bit tamer. I'm honestly not sure how my boys would respond to the original ending (Kakezara gets tied behind Benizara's wedding palanquin and is dragged to her death), but there's no way I could bring an image like that to them with any kind of honesty or truth. I've had to adapt a few of the Fairy Tales in that manner, but I don't see a problem with doing that so long as it doesn't change the overall heart of the story. I do tend to keep mild violence that is an integral part of a story in the story. (Or I just don't use the story at all if I think it is too violent -- for instance, there is another story where a mother abandons her blind son to die, under pressure from her village. I don't really want to plant any sort of seed in my kids' heads that a mother would do that to her child!) The idea is that kids at this stage of development listen to Fairy Tales with symbolic ears, rather than literal, and hence don't process the violence as that. But I'm not confident enough that my kids do not take it a bit more literally than intended, so I don't feel comfortable with sharing images that are too violent or disturbing with them. It's probably a matter of knowing your own kids, and understanding your own response to things like that.

The boys' big letters K and k.














J's written verse. He missed the space between the first two words, so I tossed some stars in after his next several. Then he showed me that he could write with the space included, so I left it out of most of the rest of the verse, although I watched closely and inserted it if it seemed like he was going to just run into the next word. He's still using "&" instead of "and", so I'm keeping an eye on that, too. And he's still writing some of his letters from the bottom up rather than the other way around. Again, just something I'm keeping an eye on from now. We're using handwriting letter sheets at practice time with arrow directions on how to form the letters on it, I'm hoping that alone will help with this.

Zoo Boy's verse, and another first for him -- he actually wants the entire verse in his good book so he can read it himself. So while he agreed to write the first letter of each line (and even wrote the first two letters of the first line, with a blue dot as a "space keeper" like J's gold stars), he asked me to write the rest of the line for him. He was very pleased when the verse was completed and he read it out loud, yet another first for him during our actual story work time (he does not join J and I when we recite the verses, although I do catch him occasionally reading the verse outside of story time -- I keep it posted all week so they can read it when they feel like it).

I only post my drawings as a reference point for what the kids are using to create their drawings. The three of us draw the various key components of the drawings together, then I indicate that they can get more creative by saying "I think I'll add a..." type of line. You'll see in Zoo Boy's drawing that he chose not to draw Benizara. But that's his prerogative, he had already drawn the "K" (King) which was the primary focus of the drawing. He also added a scepter to the King's hand, his own personalization of his drawing.

You'll also note that I misspelled Kakezara. J certainly noted that. Again, all good stuff, I think it's important for the kids to see me mess up and not get upset about it. In fact, modeling how to handle mistakes is probably one of the most important things we do as parents!