The thoughts of one of the Hungarian literature teachers

by Erika Farkas, Literature teacher from Petrik Lajos Vocational School, Budapest, Hungary

Folk tales have always been close to my heart, that is why I had a go at browsing tales with excitement, because I wanted to find the most appropriate tales for this project. What is more I found it a special challenge to think about the process of such a topic that is not an important part of the school curriculum.

I usually watch Hungarian folk tales on Youtube in my spare time. Once I was watching a tale I started to think of ideas what tasks I could give the children on a lesson to become familiar with folk tales and to discover common features in them. Some ideas has come to my mind. First I would like to know what the students think about the given animals from a tale and then after watching the tale how their opinions would change about the features of the animals. It is an interesting aspect whether those features stay the same in other tales, stories and films or some other features appear. Later we have found out some new elements and have built in the plan of the lesson with the colleagues who teach Literature.

The meeting was a very positive experience for me by seeing how active and eager the students were. They made beautiful posters and demonstrated their works very well. The short videos were very interesting, funny, rich and took the shine out of my expectations. The scenes were worked out with a good sense of humour and talent of acting. My personal favourite was a report on "King Kacor" whether he was a good king or not. In this report they could illustrate the world of modern reports in a realistic way. We felt good that we could achieve the major part of our plan.