I love telling stories and fairy tales to my younger pupils, in B Class. I also love reading them from the original, and they often love to listen, especially if it’s the last hour of the day and they are too tired to do anything else; it’s relaxing. I tell them a few things about the story before I start, and I ask them a few questions about it when I finish, to see if they have understood the basics, and they usually have. On such a day, I brought Rapunzel to class, and they were totally absorbed!

We also discussed the plot, analyzed the characters and shared our feelings about this tale. The next time we had a lesson, I wrote a few sentences, excerpts from the story, on the board, and asked them if they could guess what they meant. Indeed they could, for most of them, they have a way of remembering clusters of meanings that I repeat, so then I asked them to copy them to their notebooks and see if they could tell me which sentence goes first, second etc. I had to switch to Greek here a lot, if I was to get any answers, but in general they were able to number the sentences correctly.

On the third time we had our Rapunzel lesson, it was time for them to draw! Each student was given a sentence from the story, told which scene to draw, and asked to copy that sentence at the back of the piece of paper. We put all the drawings together, in the order the sentences appear in the story. This was the result (some of it, anyway):

This endeavour came after I attended a seminar with Mr. Nikos Toumazatos, about how to illustrate a children’s book. I was definitely inspired, what can I say! I just hope I can ask my students to illustrate more in the future, it definitely seems to be making a difference when it comes to involvement in the story!