I’m really loving the power of Interactive Whiteboard technology to bring the resources of Internet to my fingertips and making said resources big enough for everyone to see!

Stage 1 and Early Stage 1 students are studying fables this term, and this week is Aesop’s “The grasshopper and the ant”.

An obviously useful website has been DLTK’s Crafts for kids , and I’ve supplemented the text of the fable from the site with Google Images searches for some amazing graphics of grasshoppers, ants and corn kernels.

A word of warning about the following short Youtube version of “The ant and the grasshopper”, as told by Jack Spirko on “The Survival Podcast”. It’s fascinating for its political stance, and as an example of how stories have been told, retold and evolved with the retelling. After previewing it on my own, I elected to use it in lessons only up to the image of the dead grasshopper being overwhelmed by ants. (The sequence after that is very confronting, and perhaps useful for higher stage levels discussing the persuasiveness of media products. But not essential or relevent for my purposes.)