Marianthe's Story: Painted Words and Spoken Memories

Author:  Aliki

Genre:  Multicultural and International Literature

This book has 2 stories in one.  The book tells the story of a child who was brought to a new country.  She has to deal with a new school, new culture, and a new language.  The girls name was Marianthe.  She dreaded the day starting a new school and not knowing anyone or how to speak to them.  Her mother supports her and tells her to use her body and art to talk versus speaking.  The first story talks about how Marianthe eventually starts to learn English and that it is becoming familiar to her, but she is able to tell her story through art.  The second story is about the same girl.  She tells a story in class to her classmates about where she is from and what she went through.  She talks about the famine and how her younger brother died.  It was a very sad story and when she was finished the teacher, Mr. Petrie, said “Welcome to your new life.”  The book doesn’t really say where she is from but just emphasizes the struggles someone from another country, culture and language go through.

This book was so touching to me that I teared up reading the second story.  I would definitely have my students read this book.  We would then use Wordle to describe how the book made us feel.  I then would have a discussion about how people come from different places and we should never judge someone or make fun of them because they look different or may not understand us.  I would use the term that Marianthe’s mother used in the first story and ask my class how can you “talk with your hands?”  I would do an activity where the class broke up into small groups and each student told a story ONLY using their hands.  And then I would ask the class as a whole to voice how hard it was to talk with only using your hands?  A person that can’t speak our language is going through that battle each day.  This lesson would relate to most classrooms today due to the fact that there is a growing number of students in the classrooms today that may not know English or know very little.

Link: Example Wordle description