The Rabbit in the Moon: Folktales from China and Japan

Name: Kimberly Adams
School: Hillel Academy of Pittsburgh
Grade Taught: second grade
Subjects Taught: language arts and social studies
Appropriate Grade Levels for this Book: 2-4
Review:
The Rabbit in the Moon: Folktales from China and Japan is a unit plan that is published for grades three though six. The unit plan provides teachers with detailed lessons for teaching specific Japanese and Chinese folktales to students. It also provides the scripted words for the folktales being taught. One component of this plan I liked is that it is well organized and easy to navigate to find information. Also, a good variety of folktales are included within the unit. It was also helpful that they include useful teaching tips and warnings. I found the warnings particularly interesting because they were not always things I would think about while teaching. Most of the activities that are included would be engaging of students across grade levels.
There are a few words of caution I wanted to offer about this unit. The particular unit I am reviewing was published in 1995. The quality of the stories is not affected by this, but I feel that a lot of the activities would not be challenging enough for the recommended grade levels. Fourth grade though middle school teachers may need to add more complex activities to this unit to make it more challenging. I find that most of these activities would best be suited for second and third grade. That being said, the folktales could be used for almost any grade level.
One more issue this unit has due to its older publishing date is that it comes with slides of the folktales instead of something that can actually be used on a compute and more modern technology. I was fortunate that someone had copied the slides onto a CD so that they could be viewed on a computer, but I do not believe the CD actually comes with the book. The slides are gorgeous, however, I’m not even sure what someone would need to view them. On the plus side, all of the folktales mentioned in the unit can be found as a trade book, which could be found easily online or at a local library.

I teach first grade. This curriculum is for grades 3-6, but could be adapted easily for first and second grade. It is well-structured. The introduction aides the teacher in setting up the unit to be taught. The lessons are thoughtfully planned out, and include a variety of engaging activities. The folktales are included. There is also a CD of slides to accompany one of the folktales. Any elementary classroom would have the materials needed for the lessons. The appendices explain what folklore is and the cultural context. It could be used to enrich students. I highly recommend this curriculum to anyone teaching about Asian culture and/or folktales.

Mengdie Peng
Chinese Pre-K—6th Grade
Cardinal Maida Academy
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Jennifer Leonard
All Subjects
Kindergarten
Cardinal Maida Academy
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Donna Blair
All Subjects
Preschool/ Pre-Kindergarten
Cardinal Maida Academy
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Janeth Kloc
Spanish
Pre-K—6th Grade
Cardinal Maida Academy
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The Rabbit in the Moon: Folktales from China and Japan is a curriculum which contains Chinese folktales and Japanese folktales. There are six lessons in this book and each lesson contains one or two folktales. Before the folktales in each lesson, there are introductions, objectives, instructions, supplementary notes, vocabulary, questions and follow-up activities, all of which give the teacher who wants to use this book some ideas of how to conduct the lesson. Above all, it doesn’t matter if the teacher himself or herself does not know much about the background knowledge of these stories, because the “supplementary notes” already provide us with the most important part of it.
The folktales in this curriculum are very educational and reflect some value held by Chinese or Japanese people. We can easily realize that there are some similar beliefs between these two countries. Besides some spoken stories, there are also plays, which can be acted by students themselves. “The Old Woman and the Tiger” and “The Monkey and the Pheasant” are two of the plays in the unit. The students will learn much more of the essence of the story if they read and perform it themselves.
At last, there is a closing activity, which asks students to create their own folktales. In this way, the teacher will know how much the students learned from it and also how well do they understand the Chinese and Japanese traditional culture.
In conclusion, I highly recommend this book to elementary school teachers from Preschool to Grade 6 because it offers unique cross curricular ideas. With some modification this unit could be adapted for students in the lower grades. Students will learn so much through these fun and interesting multi-sensory activities.

Rebecca Banko
Queen of Angels Catholic School
Social Studies and Language Arts
Grades 6-8
I reviewed the curriculum unit The Rabbit in the Moon: Folktales from China and Japan. This unit is suitable for students from kindergarten through eighth grade. It would need a little adaptation for kindergarteners, but it is very easy to follow and adjust up or down.
This unit does a nice job of introducing the aspects of a story and the characteristics of folktales. With my older students I would read the choices in our book, reviewing the characteristics of folktales as we read. Then I would have the students choose either a Japanese or Chinese tale from the unit to act out in a skit, or puppet performance. They could do this for their buddy classes in the primary grades.
I would want the students to choose an aspect of Chinese or Japanese culture to include in writing their own folktales. By studying the readings in their books and the choices in the unit the middle school students would be able to create an original folktale that focuses on the culture and the literary aspects of a folktale.
I would use this unit as an extension in my literature classes. I have several Chinese and Japanese folktales in my anthologies. Cat and Rat: Legend of the Chinese Zodiac would fit in with the activities for How the World was Made. My anthology also includes The Old Demon about an old Chinese woman who saves her family and village, but sacrifices her life. The Wise Old Woman is a Japanese folktale in my anthology that I would use in conjunction with the Japanese folktales in the unit.
This unit could be a valuable connection between literature and social studies.

Curriculum Unit Plan Review: The Rabbit in the Moon: Folktales from China and Japan
Tisa Schuit K-5 Reading Teacher Winchester Thurston
Grades: 3-6
This unit contains six lessons, handouts, a closing activity and a DVD which contains the slides to some of the stories in the lessons. This is a great unit which contains multisensory activities and incorporates many subjects. Lesson 3 contains two plays. This not only supports many important reading skills such as oral reading fluency, it incorporates other modalities of learning by requiring movement as students perform their parts. Lesson 5 requires students to complete math problems and to study geography. Many of the lessons incorporate writing activities as well.
I will use some of the lessons in this unit to supplement the traditional literature unit taught by the third grade teacher. The teacher uses folktales from many countries but only a few from Japan.

I am the Director/Teacher of students ages 2 to 5 in a multicultural preschool program, Beginnings, at Calvary Episcopal Church. I am also one of a team of teachers in an English as a Second Language Class for adults at the church, many of whom are parents of the children in our preschool. A large percentage of students in both settings are from East Asia.
The Rabbit in the Moon: Folktales from China and Japan is designed as a curriculum unit for upper elementary grades developed as part of the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE). It is well organized with user-friendly icons to distinguish sections, a matrix indexing all eight folktales, a pronunciation guide for both Japanese and Chinese language and supplementary notes and resources listed in appendices. Lessons employ various forms in presenting the tales: written passages, short plays, choral readings, slide show of illustrations from books (included on a disc). Warnings about the issues of cultural appropriateness and violence in the material are included in the introduction.
Although intended for upper elementary students, this unit could be adapted for use in the preschool classroom. Many of the unit goals are appropriate for four and five year olds. Although the concepts of story parts and creative writing are too advanced for this age, they could use the material for creative and imaginative activities like art, role-play, music and movement. The folktales are brief and could be presented using the various resources suggested in the unit. This unit gives teachers the opportunity to increase diversity in literacy materials without having to condense longer books. In a multi cultural classroom, it allows students from these countries to use familiar material. It could also provide an opportunity to involve parents of the children from China and Japan as resource persons in the classroom.

Kayla Anthony
Early Childhood (Pre-K-4th Grade)
This curriculum has six lessons for third through sixth grade. The lessons cover topics in Social Studies, Language Arts, Multicultural Studies, and Literature. In each lesson there are one or two folktales included. The folktales are from Japan and China. They range from topics such as origins, lessons, kindness, friendship and more. Each lesson has a follow- up activity to do once the story has been read. These activities have students writing myths and origins, drawing, conducting a play, working with maps, and more. After all of the lessons are taught, the students getting to write their own folktale.
The Rabbit in the Moon curriculum is good for upper elementary students. Everything is laid out for the teacher in the manual. The stories are included with each of the lessons along with a pronunciation guide for difficult words. This would be good to teach in a classroom because all of the lessons include a story and have the students using creativity to complete an activity. Many of the activities include writing or the teacher can add writing with a drawing. The students can create their own works and learn to love writing. This curriculum also teaches students about different cultures. They can compare Chinese and Japanese stories. They can also compare these stories to their own culture.

The curriculum unit itself has been thoroughly described in previous critiques and it is therefore not necessary to repeat that description.
Overall, this is a good unit that can be adapted for the preschool age group. Before using this unit with preschool children, however, they should be reminded that some stories are fiction and that the characters that the author includes in the stories may be from his or her imagination. Using The Three Little Pigs, for example, pigs do not talk or build houses and the wolf does not climb down the chimney. For children who may not have a firm grasp on the difference between fantasy and reality, this may help them to understand the folktales without being frightened.
The first story, The Rabbit in the Moon, is short and can easily be read aloud to the preschool children. The rabbit throws himself into the fire at the end of the story and is rewarded for his self-sacrifice with his image being on the moon for all to see each night. While this imagery may be frightening for some, a discussion about how we give of ourselves for others will help the children understand the concept of selflessness. In addition, the discussion could include the comparison with the “man in the moon” and how we explain things that we don’t understand. A follow up activity would be to look at an image of the moon and encourage the children to draw what they see.
The second story, How the World was Made, would be more difficult to incorporate for the preschool age group and I would not include it in the unit.
The third lesson includes two stories, The Old Woman and the Tiger and The Monkey and the Pheasant. Both stories are written in play form and have several characters that are inanimate objects that come to life to help the main character. The preschool children could choose characters and wear signs displaying a picture of their character. The narrator could direct the children as she read the story to repeat various lines from their characters and to respond with the sound effects. The second story, The Monkey and the Pheasant is similar to The Little Red Hen. The two stories should be compared to show the universality in themes.
The fourth story, The Funny Little Woman, is easily adapted using the book of the same name from the library. It leads nicely to a discussion of your reaction to problem.
Lesson five is The Grateful Snake. This story is rather long and without supplementary slides to hold the younger children’s attention. I would not include this in the unit.
The final lesson included two stories, The Boy Who Drew Cats and The Golden Axe. The Boy Who Drew Cats also has a picture book at the library. I was not able to review the book and cannot speak to the graphic nature of the scene when the boy awakens to find “that all the floor of the temple was covered with blood” and “the mouths of all the cats…were red and wet with blood.”
Even though The Golden Axe is a little long and has no accompany visuals I would use the story in the unit. I would encourage the children to close their eyes and imagine the pictures in their mind as I read the story to them. Afterward I would ask them to draw a picture of a part of the story that appealed to them. We would then determine which happened first, next, and last creating a timeline of the story using their drawings.

Steven Balsomico
Shaler Area High School
Japanese Language 1-4; AP Japanese
Considering this review is the third posted on the website, I won’t waste time attempting to describe the unit, as both previous posters did an excellent job of summarizing the unit. Instead, I will talk about a different use for the unit.
The unit, as is, is intended for upper elementary school students. While this unit works well towards that end, I am a high school language teacher, and so find the actual unit to be less then helpful. Since it is created for children, it would bore almost any upper level student. Furthermore, as I teach Japanese language and the unit is in English, it is worse still.
However, the unit can be adapted very easily for an upper level Japanese (or Chinese) language classroom. Essentially, you utilize the very same lesson plan, but instead, return the folk tales to their native languages. That way, students are exposed to native language with which native speakers would be familiar.
With the stories in the native language, teachers could opt to keep to students simply reading them, or, as suggested in the unit, acting them out. Depending on the level, the native language material could be limited to the actual stories, or can be broadened to the discussion questions for each lesson. For higher level classes, students would be able to not only demonstrate comprehension of the material, but also provide feedback and opinions about it.
The problem is that I am not sure how accurate the English translations in the unit are to the original source. I have not personally read any of these stories in their native writing (though I intend to now), and so they could be written in a fairly basic sense to appeal to elementary school students. As a result, it would be difficult for me to say just exactly what level of language learners for which such a unit would be appropriate.
Finally, I think one of the most valuable activities this lesson would lend itself to the suggestion for students to create their own folktale. Drawing on the language used in the originals, students would be able to see how folktales were created, and as a result, be able to use their language skills to create their own.

Ann Marie Kern
Grade 5
Subjects: All
Chartiers Valley Intermediate School
Curriculum Review:
The Rabbit in the Moon: Folktales from China and Japan, A curriculum unit for upper elementary grades, Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education. A Program of the Institute for International Studies. (SPICE)
Grades: 3 – 6
Subjects it can be used in: *Reading *LanguageArts *Social Studies
Teacher’s Guide contains:
• 6 lessons (including 8 folktales), each with folktales in large print for reproduction as student reading material or overhead/SMART board duplication
• teacher’s notes outlining the lesson plan and its specific objectives, materials, background notes, discussion questions, and follow-up activities
• “Create a Folktale” a culminating activity in which students write their own tales
• Introduction to Folklore and Bibliography for teacher’s reference
• Slides (optional) for the stories, the book does provide a bibliography just in case a teacher does not have the technology.
In this curriculum the focus is folktales from China and Japan. The unit exposes students to a variety of tales that teach cultural heritage, lessons/morals, the commonalities between Japanese and Chinese cultural traditions and the concept of story structure.
I liked this unit because of the ease in which I could use the materials within my reading/language and social studies curriculum. The stories could be used to introduce story elements and construction, language usage, descriptive language, writing form and cultural heritage. Everything is detailed and explained. It allows you to take the basic concepts of the unit and expand to whatever you would like to accomplish within your own curriculum.
I plan on using this with a small set of stories from our classroom reader. I feel that the unit we currently use does not expand enough on the cultural importance of the stories and structure. The Rabbit in the Moon: Folktales from China and Japan opens up the students to a wider array of stories that they may or may not be familiar. I can show the students basic Japanese and Chinese culture using the stories and expanding for the students to research and/or find similarities/differences with other cultures, including their own. Within this unit I can also instruct about story arrangement, use of language and author’s purpose.
A review of each of the stories is advised. Some do contain violence and stereotypes. If those stories are used, a discussion with the students is warranted. Suggestions are given on page 11 of the unit on how to proceed.