Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Dr. Seuss and Beauty and the Beast

What do those two things have in common? Absolutely nothing, other than they are going to share one post. :o)

I created one bulletin board design at the beginning of the school year and kept it up until a couple of weeks ago. The idea was to keep up the one design all year and rotate student work. Well, I got bored.
To teach the children how to write letters I read the book The Lorax and had the kids write letters to the Onceler to tell him what he did wrong in the story. While doing this project I realized that the kids could use this same story at the end of the year, after Earth Day, to write persuasive essays to the Lorax to convince him to move to our town. Well, my Seuss wheels got turning.... then we had Read Across America....and I wore my Thing Two shirt all day... and I decided the bulletin board had to change!!
I made the home of the Onceler where he lerks in his lerkum:
Do you see him lerking up there in his lerkum?
And here is his pail, where you need three dimes, two nails, and the shell of a great, great, grandfather snail:
Standing at the bottom is the poor Lorax, thinking back to the days when the sky was blue:
When the Truffula Trees grew their great truffula tufts:
And the Bar-ba-loots played in the shade, in their Bar-ba-loot suits
And the Swamee Swans sang in the crisp cool breeze:
The only thing I am missing are the Humming-fish, but I ran out of room.

The other day my friend and her husband both had to go out of town, but they had tickets to go see Beauty and the Beast. Their seats were right by tickets my mom and dad got. I was very fortunate enough to be the beneficiary of their bad luck! Sparky was also out of town so my mom called my cousin to go with us. It was wonderful! Here are a couple of pictures from before it began:
It was great and the woman who played Belle did an AMAZING job! I came home and put in the tape (no, not DVD, I said tape...like VHS). Um, it was not very good. The story was good, the songs were good, the characters were cute, but the quality was horrid and the beast was really scary. I do not remember it being like that. The Belle on stage sounded much better than the Belle in the movie.
The VHS felt kinda like the reaction I had when I watched Cinderella II: When Dreams Come True. I was shocked and somewhat repulsed by the voice coming out of my beloved Cinderella. It just wasn't right. That was not the same voice that Cinderella had in the original film and nothing else would due. Now, the proper voice for Belle is not the one in the video. Maybe Disney will unlock their vaults and release an updated refurbished version of Beauty and the Beast that will live up to my expectations. I am hoping the decline in my appreciation for the original movie is due to the deterioration of the actual VHS tape....

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