Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears
Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears:
Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears: A West African Tale is a picture book by Verna Aardema and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon told in the form of a cumulative tale written for young children, which tells an African legend. In this origin story, the mosquito lies to a lizard, who puts sticks in his ears and ends up frightening another animal, which down a long line causes a panic. In the end, an owlet is killed and the owl is too sad to wake the sun until the animals hold court and find out who is responsible. The mosquito is eventually found out, but it hides in order to escape punishment. So now it constantly buzzes in people's ears to find out if everyone is still angry at it.
The artwork was made using watercolor airbrush, pastels, and India ink. The cutout shapes were made by using friskets and vellum cut shapes at different angles.
This story is a resource for teachers to teach the skill cause and effect: "A cause is something that makes something else happen; An effect is what happens as a result of the cause"
characters: Mother Owl
mosquito— annoy
iquana— frighten
python— scare
rabbit— startle
crow— alarm
monkey— kill
conflict: The problem in this story is trying to find out who is responsible for killing the owlet. Mother Owl woke the sun up every day so the day came. After her baby died, Mother Owl will not tell the sun to rise again until she finds out who is responsible for killing her baby.
Cumulative tale: In a cumulative tale, sometimes also called a chain tale, action or dialogue repeats and builds up in some way as the tale progresses. With only the sparest of plots, these tales often depend upon repetition and rhythm for their effect, and can require a skilled storyteller to negotiate their tongue-twisting repetitions in performance. The climax is sometimes abrupt and sobering as in "The Gingerbread Man." The device often takes the form of a cumulative song or nursery rhyme. Many cumulative tales feature a series of animals or forces of nature each more powerful than the last.
Cumulative song:
A cumulative song is a song with a simple verse structure modified by progressive addition so that each verse is longer than the verse before.
Cumulative songs are popular for group singing, in part because they require relatively little memorization of lyrics, and because remembering the previous verse to concatenate it to form the current verse can become a kind of game.
For example: The Twelve Days of Christmas
The Twelve Days of Christmas:
"The Twelve Days of Christmas" is an English Christmas carol that enumerates in the manner of a cumulative song a series of increasingly grand gifts given on each of the twelve days of Christmas (the twelve days after Christmas). The song, published in England in 1780 without music as a chant or rhyme, is thought to be French in origin. "The Twelve Days of Christmas" has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 68. The tunes of collected versions vary. The standard tune now associated with it is derived from a 1909 arrangement of a traditional folk melody by English composer Frederic Austin, who first introduced the now familiar prolongation of the verse "five gold rings".
What are little girls made of?
sugar, spice and everyhting nice
The Powerpuff Girls were created by Professor Utonium in an attempt "to create the perfect little girls" using a mixture of "sugar, spice, and everything nice". However, he accidentally spilled a mysterious substance called "Chemical X" into the mixture, creating, instead of the "perfect little girl", three girls (each possessing one of the above elements dominating her personality), and granting all three superpowers including flight, super strength, super speed, near invulnerability, x-ray vision, super senses, heat vision, and energy projection.
Toni Morrison:
Toni Morrison is an American novelist, editor, and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed characters. Among her best known novels are The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), and Beloved (1987). She was also commissioned to write the libretto for a new opera, Margaret Garner, first performed in 2005. She won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1988 for Beloved and the Nobel Prize in 1993. On May 29, 2012, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Morrison serves as Professor Emeritus at Princeton University.
★ 第一位得諾貝爾獎的黑人女作家
The Bluest Eye:
The Bluest Eye is a 1970 novel by American author Toni Morrison. It is Morrison's first novel and was written while she was teaching at Howard University and raising her two sons on her own. The story is about a year in the life of a young black girl named Pecola who develops an inferiority complex due to her eye color and skin appearance. It is set in Lorain, Ohio, against the backdrop of America's Midwest during the years following the Great Depression. The point of view switches between the perspective of Claudia MacTeer, as a child and as an adult, and a third-person omniscient viewpoint. Because of the controversial nature of the book, which deals with racism, incest, and child molestation, there have been numerous attempts to ban it from schools and libraries.
Plot:
In Lorain, Ohio, 9-year-old Claudia MacTeer and her 10-year-old sister Frieda live with their parents, who take two other people into their home: Mr. Henry, a tenant, and Pecola Breedlove, a temporary foster child whose house was burned down by her wildly unstable father, Cholly: a man widely gossiped about in the community. Pecola is a quiet, passive young girl with a hard life, whose parents are constantly fighting, both verbally and physically. Pecola is continually reminded of what an "ugly" girl she is, fueling her desire to be white with blue eyes. Most chapters' titles are extracts from the Dick and Jane paragraph in the novel's prologue, presenting a white family that may be contrasted with Pecola's; perhaps to incite discomfort, the chapter titles contain much sudden repetition of words or phrases, many cut-off words, and no interword separations.
The novel, through flashbacks, explores the younger years of both of Pecola's parents, Cholly and Pauline, and their struggles as African-Americans in a largely White Anglo-Saxon Protestant community. Pauline now works as a servant for a wealthier white family. One day in the novel's present time, while Pecola is doing dishes, a drunk Cholly rapes her. His motives are largely confusing, seemingly a combination of both love and hate. After raping her a second time, he flees, leaving her pregnant.
Claudia and Frieda are the only two in the community that hope for Pecola's child to survive in the coming months. Consequently, they give up the money they had been saving to buy a bicycle, instead planting marigold seeds with the superstitious belief that if the flowers bloom, Pecola's baby will survive. The marigolds never bloom, and Pecola's child, who is born prematurely, dies. In the aftermath, a dialogue is presented between two sides of Pecola's own deluded imagination, in which she indicates strangely positive feelings about her rape by her father. In this internal conversation, Pecola speaks as though her wish has been granted: she believes that she now has blue eyes.
Claudia, as narrator a final time, describes the recent phenomenon of Pecola's insanity and suggests that Cholly (who has since died) may have shown Pecola the only love he could by raping her. Claudia lastly laments on her belief that the whole community, herself included, have used Pecola as a sort of scapegoat to make themselves feel prettier and happier.
Beasts of the Southern Wild:
Beasts of the Southern Wild is a 2012 American fantasy drama film directed by Benh Zeitlin and adapted by Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar from Alibar's one-act play Juicy and Delicious. After playing at film festivals, it was released on June 27, 2012, in New York and Los Angeles, and later expanded wider.
Plot summary:
As a storm approaches a southern Louisiana bayou community called the "Bathtub" (a community cut off from the rest of the world by a levee), six-year-old Hushpuppy and her unhealthy, hot-tempered father, Wink, are optimistic about their life and their future. The children in school are being taught by Miss Bathsheba about nature and the release of prehistoric creatures called "Aurochs" from the melting ice caps. At home, Hushpuppy fends for herself while her father is missing. When he returns, he is wearing a hospital gown and bracelet. They argue, and when Hushpuppy returns to her house, she deliberately sets it on fire. A chase ensues between the two, and she ends up getting slapped by Wink. When she retaliates by punching him in the chest, Wink collapses. Hushpuppy, realizing the damage she has caused, runs for help only to find her father missing when she returns.
Meanwhile, in the Arctic, the frozen Aurochs in an ice shelf start drifting into the ocean.
Many of the Bathtub residents start fleeing due to the threat of the oncoming storm. Wink reappears staggering along the side of the road and finds and drags Hushpuppy home to start barricading before the storm hits the town. In an effort to make his daughter feel better Wink attempts to scare off the storm by firing a rifle at the clouds. The next day, the two tour the devastation and connect with the surviving residents. The Bathtub residents celebrate and make plans to rebuild their community, but everything begins to die because of the salt water brought in by the storm surge. Wink hatches a plan to drain the water away by destroying the levee. He and a small group of friends plant dynamite and blow a hole in the wall using an alligator gar, and the water recedes, but it brings the authorities who enforce the mandatory evacuation order, removing the inhabitants of the Bathtub to an emergency shelter. There, Dr. Maloney performs surgery on Wink, but it doesn't restore Wink's health. At the first opportunity, the evacuees storm out and escape back to their homes.
Aware of her father’s condition, Hushpuppy leaves in search of her mother. She and her friends swim to a boat, the Grumpy, which takes them to a floating bar, the Elysian Fields. Hushpuppy meets a cook who may be her mother, though the woman doesn't recognize her. The cook says that she can stay if she wants, but Hushpuppy says that she's got to go home. Hushpuppy and her friends return home where she confronts the Aurochs freed from the ice caps. As the Aurochs leave, Hushpuppy enters her home and says her last goodbyes to the dying Wink, listening to his last heartbeat. She sets his funeral pyre ablaze, standing in solidarity along with the remaining residents of the Bathtub.
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