St. Patrick's Day

Nearly every year, I read Tomie dePaola's book, Fin M'coul and the Giant of Knockmany Hill to the kids. It's the best 15 minute Irish read-aloud I've ever found. It's funny and dramatic. Also, it's a trickster tale and we always love finding examples of trickster tales (what a universally satisfying genre!) AND the hero is a woman.

This year the book was lost in a classroom, and so instead I looked up Ireland in the library catalog and pulled a stack of books from the shelf. I decided to show the kids an example of all the different types of books we can find about a subject.

The students were excited to see a photograph of the Giant's Causeway in one of the nonfiction books—the same causeway Finn MacCoul is working on when that giant comes looking for him in dePaola's story. Using this same book, I did a quick lesson on the Table of Contents and index. And just to show what a handy thing an index is, I used it to look up St. Patrick's Day, which I then read to them.

Black Potatoes: the Story of the Great Irish Famine is too difficult for most of our students, but I used it now to talk about the famine in Ireland. I pointed out that many of us have families who immigrated here during that time. I showed them a copy of the picture book, Katie's Wish, about an Irish girl who blames herself for the famine. Both books tell about the same event. One tells about it through facts, and the other through fiction. Even though Katie's Wish is fiction, it tells us something that's true. Black Potatoes tells us the big story, but Katie's Wish tells us about the famine through a fictionalised account of one part of the story.

I want the kids to understand that there are different ways we can talk about the same thing.

I talked about the Irish being forbidden to speak their own language, and the importance of language and stories to every culture. I said that when people saw that the threat to Gallic combined with the Great Starvation to threaten the survival of Irish folktales, they began writing those stories down. Our library has a number of these Irish folktales, which I then displayed and encouraged the children to read.

I guess my Irish lesson is a meandering sort of thing. I want the kids to appreciate the different forms a story can take, to understand the importance of language and stories for the preservation of a culture. And, most important of all, I want to share some of my enthusiasm for the beautiful country called Ireland.