Research: Books

Story book 1: The Very Hungry Caterpillar

The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a children's book illustrated and written by Eric Carle which was first published by the World Publishing Company in 1969, later published by Penguin Putnam.  It’s about a caterpillar that eats its way through a wide variety of foodstuffs before pupating and emerging as a butterfly. The Very Hungry Caterpillar uses colourful picture and simple text with educational themes like counting, learning the days of the week, different types of foods, and how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly.

Synopsise:

A green baby caterpillar hatches from an egg, and then starts craving food. He eats through fruits for five days, one piece of fruit on the first, two on the second, and so on up to the fifth day. Then the caterpillar starts to eat more types of foods. Soon after the caterpillar is finished eating he realise that he has eaten too much and feels ill. The caterpillar soon feels better and then spins a cocoon in which he stays for the following two weeks. Later, the caterpillar emerges as a bright, colourful butterfly with large, gorgeous, multi-coloured wings. These are the types of food that the caterpillar eats: 1 apple, 2 pears, 3 plums, 4 strawberries, 5 oranges, 1 piece of chocolate cake, 1 ice cream cone 1 pickle, 1 slice of Swiss cheese, 1 slice of salami, 1 lollipop, 1 piece of cherry pie, 1 sausage, 1 cupcake, 1 slice of watermelon and 1 green leaf.

Opinion:

This story dose well to entertain young children because in the story book it’s able to attracted their attention with big colourful pictures of food which is affective as its eye catching for due to the contrasts of colours. This can help our performance because we can make bright and colourful costumes for our charters to capture the children’s attention while they watch our piece. The book is also effective because it has educational purposes as each teaches children how to count and other things like different types of food but even with these educational tools in the story children still find the book fun.

Story book 2: Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?

“Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?” Is a children's picture book published in 1967. It was written and illustrated by Bill Martin, Jr. and Eric Carle, the book is designed to help toddler’s learn different colours and the meanings of everyday objects. The book itself has little plot. Instead, the narrator of the book asks various animals what they see with them saying what they see is another coloured animal and this is repeated following the chain of animals. The story itself has a Brown Bear, Red Bird, Yellow Duck, Blue Horse, Green Frog, Purple Cat, White Dog, Black Sheep, a Goldfish, a Teacher and Students.

Opinion:

Brown bear, Brown bear, what do you see? Is written by the same person who create the very Hungry caterpillar so they have similar methods of telling the story but Brown bear, Brown bear, what do you see? Has more creative art work for pictures as it has a lot more to show with the different types of animals. This links to my point about using bright and colourful thing to capture the children’s attention towards our show. The book itself has little story and more educational themes but is still very entertain which could show that our show doesn’t need to have a big plot but just needs to be entertain for the children with colours and creative, loveable characters.

Little Red part 1

Today in lesson we started work on Little Red Riding hood for our performing to children workshop. We cast Meg as Little Red, Dan MacKay as Narrator, Dan Smith as The wolf and Toby as Red’s Grandma. We start our piece with Little Red interacting with me, Tom, Carl, Dom, Toby and Freya as we our all pretending to be animals like Birds, squirrels and deer’s, all friendly woodland creature. Red than runs to the front and says “Hello boys and girls, I’m Little Red Riding Hood”, the woodland creatures than go “Noooooo, you’re Little Red”. Red than asks “Has anyone seen my Basket”, the narrator now holds up the basket and the animals point at the basket to encourage the children to tell Red where her basket is. After the children have shouted at red telling her where the basket is, Red and the animals join arms and sing “I’m off to see my Grandma” which is a changed version of “I’m off to see the wizard” from “The wizard of Oz”.

“I’m off to see my Grandma,

My Grandma who lives in the wood
I hear she sick and feels a bit ikk
oh, what am I going to do.
I'll take her some treat right into woods
And make her feel better just like she should
Because, because, because, because, because
Her name is little red riding hood
We're off to see her grandma
Her grandma who live in the woods”

Me, Tom, Carl, Dom, Toby and Freya then all become trees in a forest as the Wolf then appears on stage and another song starts. This song is a change version of “Mr Grinch” from “Grinch” but is changed to “Mr Wolf”.

Trees: “You’re an mean one Mr Wolf
You really are a fiend
You're as cuddly as a hedgehog
And as charming as a mouse
Mr wolf!
You're nothing but a bad kitty with furry black tail”
Wolf: "I'm no kitty"
Trees: "You're monster Mr wolf
Your hearts an empty soul
Your brain is full of spiders
you've got evil in your soul
Mr wolf!
I wouldn't touch you with a 13 and half foot branch"
Wolf: "Booo"

The song ends and the wolf hides as Meg runs on Lost and confused, she then asks the children what way to go but as she asks the children what way to go some of the trees point in one direction and the rest point in the other direction. The wolf then enters and all the trees point in the other direction to the wolf and the children shout at Red to run away, as she goes to leave the wolf runs to the other side of the stage so the trees then point in the other direction and the children tell Red to run the other way. This repeats until the wolf then runs up to Red.

Todays rehearsal went very well today as one of our first starting on "Little Red" as we have managed to create 2 songs as well as half of the performance today which is a very good starting point. to improve we need to do just as good next lesson so that we can finish staging this story and just focus on perfecting the story with the audience interaction and child friendly humor we would like in our piece.   

Our show

Today we started to look in more detail of what stories we wanted to perform, we all choose a story we researched and pitched it to the class to see who else liked it as well as coming up with ideas we could use to perform the stories. The stories we had were Cap'O'Rushes, the gingerbread man, six swans, Jack and the beanstalk, goldIlocks, golden goose, ugly duckling, Thumbelina and little red riding hood. We talked through each one decided that we didn't want to do Thumbelina, golden goose, Cap'O'Rushes,  or six swans as theses stories were in our opinion too long and complicated for little children. We also decided not to do the gingerbread man as we believed the story was to short for our performance. We agreed that we would we do little red riding hood and Jack and the beanstalk but we couldn't decide our last story between the ugly duckling and goldilocks. We did a group vote on the 2 and chose goldilocks as it works with our other stories being based around little children in magical places. Our running order became red riding hood first, then goldilocks and finally jack and the beanstalk to end our show.