Clever Beatrice and the Best Little Pony Folklore Literature Selection

Summary:

For my collection blog this week I read Clever Beatrice and the Best Little Pony, by Margaret Willey. The book was about a little girl and her mother who lives alone in the woods on a farm in France. They discover along with bread maker from Quebec Monsieur Le Pain that an old folklore may be true.

Evaluation of genre:

This book would fall under the genre of folklore.  The folklore was about a little creature called a “Lutin”.  Monsieur Le Pain’s uncle René had told him about a Lutin. That had been in his (Uncle René’s) stable and bothered his pony.  Monsieur Le Pain never said if his uncle had seen the Lutin. No one had ever seen or heard of a Lutin before (except for Uncle René), so no one knew if a Lutin truly existed.  Folklores are thought to be stories that are told by word of mouth and passed down from generation to generation. 

            The illustrations in the book are quite beautiful. The illustrator, Heather M. Solomon created her illustrations by making a collage and using acrylic, oil and watercolor paints.  I believe that the illustrator used the outlining style along with representational and impressionistic art.  I loved turning the pages and of the book and looking at the details that Mrs. Solomon placed in her illustrations.

Questions to Ask:

Have you ever heard of  folklore?


Do you think a Lutin is real?

Have you ever been on a farm?

Have been on in a  bakery or a bread shop?

What was your least favorite part of the story?

Do you think that Monsieur Le Pain was any help?

What was your favorite part of the story?

Activities:

A motivational activity for the children to do would be to create a new ending for Clever Beatrice and the Best Little Pony.   In the end of the story Beatrice and Monsieur Le Pain catch the Lutin and they carry him to a field on the far side of the woods and set him free.  The children could rewrite the ending giving the book another ending instead of setting the Lutin free, maybe Beatrice and Monsieur Le Pain let the Lutin stay and the Lutin decided to help Monsieur Le Pain in his bakery. Or maybe Beatrice and her mother could keep the Lutin and he could help out in the stable.

Another motivational activity would be to have the children create a newspaper.  The headline would be that “Monsieur Le Pain and Clever Beatrice Caught a Lutin”. The editorials could be someone describing all the havoc the Lutin caused and what the village thinks of Lutins.  The could create an advertisements for Monsieur Le Pain and Beatrice as Lutin Catchers, and how much they would charge to catch a Lutin.  There could be an ad in the paper for Monsieur Le Pain’s Bakery selling his bread and also there could be an ad for horse riding lessons with Beatrice and her pony.

My Thoughts:

This book was not what I thought as a folklore story.  I liked this book because it was different.  I think that if I had not been paying attention I would have missed that this book would fall under the folklore genre.  I think that I was under the impression that folklores had to be a certain way, for example an older person sitting in a rocking chair spinning tales.  It truly never occurred to me that different countries would have their own folklores, but this was a pleasant lesson to learn from such a cute book.

Margaret Willey was born in Chicago, Ill.   Mrs. Willey is married and has two children.  Mrs. Willey has been writing for over thirty years in different genres.  She started writing folktales about Clever Beatrice and created sequels for the character.

References

Cullinan, B. & Galda L. & Sipe L. (2010) Literature and the Child. 7^th Ed. Belmont, CA. Wadsworth Cengage Learning.

Willey, M. (2004). Clever Beatrice and the Best Little Pony. Atheneum. New York, N.Y. 

Willey, M. (2013) Margaret Willey. Retrieved from http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/549800.Margaret_Willey

Willey, M. (2013) Mararet Willey. Retrieved from http://www.margaretwilley.com/