Stories from the Billabong Book

My Folklore WOW book that I chose was "Stories from the Billabong" by James Vance Marshall (Illustrations by Francis Firebrace). This book contains 10 of Australia's ancient aboriginal legends about how certain animals became the way that they are. For example, one of the stories is about how the kangaroo got its pouch, another is about why frogs croak, and another is about how crocodiles got their scales.

I think that this book could work for 3rd grade to 5th grade because while it's a picture book, there are lots of connections that can be made by upper-grade students to culture and information about animals. I would like to use this book for a combination of science and social studies instruction, because I think it would be really interesting to explore the folktales behind how animals became the way that they are in comparison to what we know from science about why animals are the way that they are. I think it would be interesting to research similar concepts across different cultures and see how there are similarities and differences in what explanations were created. I think it would also be interesting to see the inferential comprehension strategies that my students could use after reading this book or hearing it as a read-aloud to detect the significance of these tales, rather than just the literal comprehension of the "characters" and events. I think it would spark a lot of questions from students and maybe even create some investigable questions that we could explore in science experiments.

This book was a WOW book for me because the explanations for how the kangaroo got its pouch, why frogs croak, and how crocodiles got their scales are things that I had never heard of before and I thought it was very interesting. I've always found it exciting to learn about how different cultures come up with different explanations for things, and it made me want to research how this culture's interpretations of animals compares to other cultures' interpretations of animals. I also really liked the illustrations in the book and how the illustrator specifically used four main colors that were traditional colors of aboriginal art.