This year, in Language Arts class at the beginning of the year, we read a book called The Last Cuentista. The main message of the book is that stories matter. If we don’t have mistakes to learn from, we’re just going to make them again. If we erase our history, what makes humans human, is the stories. Whether it’s a simple story about your parents as kids, or a life changing event, or even a kids fairy tale, those stories or what they are based on can change people’s lives.

 

After reading The Last Cuentista we had to write about our own “ideal world”. When I started to write mine I was writing about an ideal world, but as I continued to write, I got lost in the story, and started it to make it a real place, and not just some story, not just something ideal, but real. I thought it was really interesting how some people reacted to this challenge. Some sent their planet into the past, some into the future, and some just started from scratch. Everybody has a different version of “ideal” but so many people had the same basic things in common. You can see my ideal world story in a previous post.

After we wrote our ideal world stories, we started to turn them into books. We did this with the help of local artist Peg Gignoux. First we used a special ink and some leaves to print cool designs and colors onto pages. Then we took a huge piece of paper and folded it up into a book with a pop-out section. Then we took the leaf prints and cut them up and pasted them in the pop-up section. We used more leaf prints to do the outside of the pop-out in a scene, from our ideal world. Then we cut out part of the book so that we could see the inside scene of the pop-up. Even after all of that, we still had more to do.  We glued on painted cardboard sheets as covers, and then printed out our story and put it inside. It was really fun! 

In the end, I thought it was a really cool, fun, and enjoyable project. The Last Cuentista was a great book that actually makes you think about what makes humans human, and why stories aren’t just for bedtime.  It was also really enjoyable to do art in Language Arts. I also enjoyed how we used nature for the prints to help us create something totally different. All in all, it was an awesome experience.