Bear's Magic Pencil

I've blogged before about using Anthony Browne's Silly Billy to introduce Guatemalan worry dolls to Year 2.  Last year I bought Bear's Magic Pencil, also by Anthony Browne.  It's one in a series of four books about Bear, who uses his magic pencil to draw himself out of trouble.  This book is a little different in that all the characters except for Bear were drawn by children as entries for a competition run by The Sun newspaper.

This morning I read the book to Year 3, and I also read to them the preface in which Anthony Browne describes how he works with groups of children in schools to make their own Bear stories.  We used the Spanish dictionaries and our knowledge of gender in Spanish to make our own Bear stories in Spanish.

I gave the children a blank template which had space for the pictures and the time sequencing words already on it.  They had to use the dictionary and their imagination to find the things that Bear drew next, select "un" or "una" as appropriate, write the words in to complete the sentence and then illustrate it.  I have been encouraging them to include the kind of lush backgrounds which are such an integral part of Browne's books.

I'm looking forward to seeing them finished!