St. Francis and the Wolf

We wrapped our block of the Western European culture up in a nice neat box with a satin ribbon this week by working with a story to awaken our Sage for the block, St. Francis. In the Enki Education 2nd Grade story, "St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio," we revisited our friend Francis later on in his workings. The boys were absolutely thrilled to hear another chapter in St. Francis' life story.

This first drawing is J's, of Francis meeting the wolf in a forest clearing. An interesting note about this, J drew his background first and then discovered he wasn't able to get Francis to show up with the skin colors he'd intended on using. So Francis wound up being green. I just made mention that that's why I always draw the characters first, and the background can go in at any time.

J's written summary of the story. We work on our story summaries during recall the day following the story, all of us contributing equally. My contribution is pretty much starting off the summary with the first sentence, making grammatical suggestions to the kids' contributions, and writing everything down on a big pad of newsprint on an easel so they can copy off of it and into their good books the following day. The boys take turns composing the next sentence, with each one adding details they want to see included, or discussing how exactly they want to word it. I act as a somewhat impartial mediator in the process and don't write anything down until they've both agreed upon it.


Zoo Boy's story drawing, of the wolf following Francis back towards town. He really liked the part in the story where the townspeople thought the wolf was going to eat Francis, then realized that it was following him, not chasing him.









Zoo Boy's simplified summary.









My half-finished drawing -- apparently I got called away in the middle of drawing this because it's a little light on details. But anyway, that's Francis making the deal with the wolf and the townspeople that brought peace to the village of Gubbio.