The Cat Who Hid Slippers
A book called The Cat Who Hid Slippers by Ela Peroci has a special place in Slovenian children's literature. This year marks its 60th birthday at the June Festival of Ljubljana.
Who is The Cat Who Hid Slippers?
The children know that is a cat that takes slippers away from messy children that do not tidy up after themselves.
And how did we get to know her better?
Three of the children presented the content of the book within the CICIUHEC Reading Project. With the book in our hands, we got to know a book's orientation – the title, the beginning and the end of the book, the back cover, how we read a book and how we handle it, put it away. We have learned that a literary author can also be a storyteller of a writer.
We continued to explore by painting using the stained glass technique. Our pictures were exhibited in the town hall. We received the second prize awarded by a professional jury.
The children created cats out of clay.
They also made cats out of cardboard sleeves and color paper…
We made puppets on a stick out of hard paper.
The children wanted to create a mini theater to stage the fairy tale. Instead of a theater, we ended up with the STAR »TV«. The children then drew the course of events on a long piece of paper and colored it.
To watch The Cat Who Hid Slippers cartoon, we invited younger children from the neighboring group as well.
And how would the fairy tale sound in a different language? We invited Eldin's mom, and while we were watching the cartoon, she was narrating the story in Albanian. It sounded completely different.
We got to know and learn a few basic Albanian words – hello, thank you, boy, girl…
A few days later another visitor joined us as well – Konstantin's mom told us a fairy tale in Serbian.
We also explored cat behavior through movement. The children discussed their experience regarding cat behavior – how the clean themselves, jump, purr, rest, drink milk.
As a conclusion, we played charades; a child imitated a certain type of cat behavior. The others tried to guess what the child was trying to show. The children later continued to entertain themselves with various movement puzzles in their play corners as well. We got to the conclusion that everyone in the world understands the cat language, no matter what country they live in and what language they speak.
Our works of art were on display in the town hall for two weeks within the June Festival of Ljubljana, which is the biggest and the most prominent festival in our town.
The final event took place in Congress Square, where we got to know The Cat Who Hid Slippers. The winners were announced and we received a prize. The event came to a conclusion at the exhibit in the town hall.
The Children's quotes
»Albanian is like Japanese. You don't understand anything.« Konstantin
»It was nice, listening to a foreign language. Albanian is a difficult language. I wouldn't want to learn it.« Enej
»Kole's mom spoke Serbian. I didn't understand anything again.« Lukas
»Did you know this one here today was actually just a costume, but I like the real Cat Who Hid Slippers.« Urban