Book Group--The Voyages of Doctor Doolittle

Our book group read 'The Voyages of Doctor Doolittle"  by Hugh Lofting for the month of November/December.  The book is about Dr. Doolittle and his quest to find Long Arrow, the greatest naturalist in the world.  He is joined by Tommy Stubbins, a 10 year old son of a cobbler, who wants to speak animals languages, just like Dr. Doolittle.
 We enjoyed the book--especially the part where Doctor Doolittle helps a wrongly accused man of murder by translating for the only witness--a dog, who was present at the alledged murder.
We had arm chair travels to the Mediterraean to take part in bull fights.  Then we traveled by boat to South America and even under the sea to find the Great Glass Sea Snail, and then back home to England.

For our activities the kids created their own 'mysterious creatures' and gave them great adjective (and alliteration) filled names.  We also ate some of the wonderful foods that they mentioned in the book--namely, fried bananas from Monteverde (the mediterraean city), pancakes that they ate with the Popsipetel tribe of the floating island of South America, and the often dreamed about hot cocoa from home, which is Puddlesby-by-the-marsh, England.

The literary topic of discussion was on setting.  Jen led the group discussion and told them a story about a hungry lion and how he spotted a man with some meat.  The story continued on about how the man threw the meat to the lion and then ran away.  She gave no details as to the scenery.  The kids were asked to draw a picture to show what they imagined the setting, or scenery might be like.  Many drew a lion in a forested area.  After all the drawing was done, Jen filled in the details, her story actually took place in a zoo.  It was an eye opening moment for the kids to realize (at least the older ones) that setting the scene, using details to provide the setting of a story was important to get a full image of what an author wants to portray.  Our book, Doctor Doolittle has lots of examples to share with each other on this subject.

Delaney created a