Year 4 explore other cultures through literature

"Nuxmax", or "greetings" in Ticuna, the native language of the Ticuna tribes in Brazil, Colombia and Peru! This week, Year 4 has been looking at a story from another cultures. Firstly, we discussed what "culture" means and what makes a culture so special. Then, we read through "The Wings of a Butterfly", a traditional folktale from native South American culture, and picked out features which gave the reader a clue as to which culture it was from - did you know that a "maloca" is a large house shared by many people in a tribe, and that a "sorva" fruit is a source of food for both animals and tribal communities living in the rainforest of South America?

We then discussed how stories such as these would have been retold across the ages by the fire for entertainment and we had a go ourselves (minus the fire), using only pictures and our memories to retell the story in a way that engaged and entertained our audience. Using facial expressions and careful poses, we also worked in pairs to create a "freeze-frame" of important events in the story. The rest of the class had to guess which part of the story our freeze-frames depicted. Here are some of our freeze-frames - perhaps you could read the story and guess which part we are showing!

All the above has helped us plan our own retelling of the story, which we are looking forward to writing and sharing with the class next week.