Maurice Sendak and the research activity

At last! My first post has come!

And as a welcome, I want to introduce all of you into de magical and illustrative world of a great author of children’s literature, Maurice Sendak.

Why Maurice Sendak?

The idea born from our teacher of children’s literature, she wrote some authors’ names on the blackboard and, in groups, we had to choose one of them and make a little research about his life and his main works. And my group chose Sendak.
The rest of the authors were Julia Donaldson, Eric Carle, Beatrix Potter, E.B. White, David Shannon, Marc Brown, Roald Dahl, Dr. Seuss and A.A. Milne. Just if you want to know more children literature's authors. The idea was to create a Great Authors Contest.

However, I must comment that the moment I saw all those names, I get a little bit shocked because I did not know any of them, even their names were unfamiliar to me. In that moment my teacher said: “By the moment you write their names on Google, you will know who they are”. My group and I were dying of curiosity so we started the research immediately.

What we found out?

Maurice Sendak (1928-2012) is an American illustrator and writer of children’s literature.

He started reading books at an early age because during his childhood he spent most of the time laid down in bed due to healthy problems. Here started his love for reading but when he was 12 and he saw Fantasia by Walt Disney, he decided he wanted to be an illustrator.

That is how a brilliant career began.

The most common known work of Sendak is the picture book Where the Wild Things Are released in 1963. The images of the book are visually rich and they have an impressive narrative power. In addition, in the story it can be found different hidden topics as domination, freedom, wishes, darkness, dreams, forbidden dreams and nightmares.

This book has been adapted into other media several times where I can point out the film released in 2009. Here you can see the trailer for you to create the idea of the images and the topics it treats.

Another important work is the book Outside Over There, written and illustrated by Sendak. It had been used as inspiration for the film Labyrinth (1986) performed by Jennifer Conelly and David Bowie.

The activity…

Once the information was collected, we had to create a visual presentation to tell our classmates this info. At the end, we had to add why we think our author is relevant and try to persuade our peers to vote for him. The reason why is because next day in class we will vote for the best author. I will keep you informed about the result! (There were no winners, there was a tie between Roald Dahl, Julia Donaldson and Eric Carle)

To finish, I would like to summarize briefly why I think this type of activity is good to develop in class.

-          It makes us create our own knowledge about a topic instead of listening during hours to the teacher.

-          Each member of the group can feel as an expert about his author giving self-confident to them in the moment to defend it in front of the class.

-          At the end, all the members of the class know important information about each topic (authors in this case), they can reflect on it and chose the “best one” giving arguments.


Turn for questions...

What do you think about this activity? In which sense do you think is good for our formation as a bilingual teacher? Can you see any CLIL tools used in it?