Spring08: websites I can't live without

It's still a bit slow in the week before classes "officially" begin, but some students are already racing ahead into the second and third week assignments, defining the project they want to do for class (for two classes, actually: Mythology and Folklore, and World Literature). As usual, I am very dependent for the success of these projects on the existence of two amazing websites, which I thought I would post about here:

Sacred Texts Archive

Sur La Lune Fairy Tales: Ebooks

Although Sacred Texts Archive is probably more geared to college-level classes, the ebooks (40 of them!0 available at SurLaLune Fairy Tales could potentially be of use to teachers and students at all levels. You will find fairy tale collections from all over the world - not just all the standard European fairy tale traditions, but also collections of fairy tales from Japan, Turkey, Africa... AMAZING. Thanks to these two websites I can literally put into my students' hands (okay: put at their fingertips) HUNDREDS OF BOOKS, books that cost them nothing, books which can be digitally searched, books which always fill their minds with ideas for so many, many, many great projects about stories and storytelling.

The books are all public domain, so the language is sometimes a bit old-fashioned, but that is perfect for my purposes. The students each choose a topic of their own, find existing stories, and then retell those stories in their own words. If the language of the original is a bit stilted or old-fashioned, that is fine - it actually COMPELS them to find new and exciting ways to take the wonderful plots and characters and tell them in a new way, bringing them to life, shaking off the dust from these venerable old books published 80 or 90 or 100 or more years ago.

So during these first weeks of class, the students are engaged in brainstorming activities before they actually choose their project topic. I love giving them advice, pointing out other books they can look at online... if a student is interested in legends of Atlantis, then they can look at this Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic by Thomas Wentworth ..., which is a collection of stories about mysterious people and places, starting out with the story of Atlantis and then stories about mysterious locations in and around the Atlantic Ocean, including the wonderful fantasy voyages of Saint Brendan the Navigator. If a student likes ghost stories, here is a search of the Sacred Texts Archive for ghost stories from all over the world! For their first brainstorming experiment, the students browse through these websites to find five books that pique their interest in some way, and then we just build from there - expanding on the possibilities, before they zero in on their final choice.

The brainstorming period at the beginning of the semester is one of the most fun parts of the class for me, seeing all the ideas and possibilities. I'll keep posting away in this "online diary" for the semester about the unfolding process as students choose their actual topics. Thanks to the amazing online resources at Sacred Texts Archive and Sur La Lune Fairy Tales, I am able to digitally put these books into my students hands and then watch them go go go ...!!!! What an adventure!