Printable Lessons:

This page contains each of the lessons for the First Colors story, listed in the same sequence (the sequence of footprints) that they appear in on the First Colors start page. You will need to scroll down to find a particular lesson.

To print a particular lesson, rather than all of them at once, scroll down to find it, select it and then print it.
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Keeping the Story Alive
Did you know that a story, like the story of the First Colors, can disapear? Did you know that stories can become lost and forgotten? When a story gets lost and forgotten, it disapears, and in a way, you could say that it dies. On the other hand, there is a way that we can keep stories alive, so that they will be there for us, in case we need them in the future.....

The way we can keep stories alive is by sharing them and telling them! If we stop telling a story, we may forget it. If we keep telling a story, it will be remembered. When we remember a whole story, this is called learning a story by heart. If we tell a story to someone else, we are giving them the story, so they can hold the story in their hearts. The wonderful thing about stories though, is that when we give them away, we get to keep them even more. When you tell a story, you have to call upon you memory, and ask your memory to work for you. Your memory is like a muscle, and the more it works, the stronger it gets. When your memory works on telling a story, that memory of the story gets stronger, and then you are sure to keep that story in your heart. If you liked the story of the First Colors, we would like you to help keep the story of the First Colors alive. You can do this by telling the story to people who do not know it yet, such as parents or friends who were not there to see the show. You can also talk with your teachers and friends at school about the parts of the story you remember the best, in order to keep the story fresh and alive in you. The first step to understanding a story is remembering it, telling it, and learning it by heart.

Teacher's Notes

Lesson: Remembering the Story

Facilitate a group retelling of the story by the students in your classroom. The students will spontaneously start throwing out what they remember of the story (often out of sequence, in their excitement). Rather than assuming that one particular student will know the whole story the best (or that you remember it in its entirety yourself) it is best to allow the group as a whole to recall the story. This is in fact what we do at Magical Rain Theaterworks when we are preparing for a show. We each know the story by heart, but before a show we will run through the sequence, with all three of us (Ike, Dan and Benito) reminding each other, in a back and forth conversation, of particular parts and details. If you do have a particular student who seems to know the whole thing and is starting to rattle it off all at once, find a good stopping point in the story and say "Stop", and then call on someone else to tell the next part (so the group develops the practice of remembering and sharing their knowledge). If there are disagreements on what happens next, have the students discuss it and arrive at their best consensus.

Objectives:

1. To rekindle the interest of the students in the story, to provide motivation for future lessons that provide cultural context.

2. To give the students practice with memorization, recall and group discussion

3. To lay the groundwork for future cultural lessons on the oral transmission of knowledge and stories by the Aztecs and other native peoples of ancient Mexico.

Ask Dr. Ike

"Long long ago, the world was nothing like the way it is now.
There was no color.
There was no music.
The world was a very sad place....
Then, from the deepest, most ancient part of the night skies,
the darkness was ruptured
by the dance of the falling stars...."

Do you remember this? This is the begining of the story of "The First Colors". Do you remember Dr. Ike's voice telling this story while the glow in the dark masks were floating on the stage. Dr. Ike is the storyteller in our theater company, and she knows many things about this story. We want to know if you have questions about the story of the First Colors that you want to ask Dr. Ike. What do you wonder about when you think about the story of the First Colors. Do you wonder who first thought of the story? Do you wonder about why the different characters in the story behaved the way they did? What questions come to your mind when you think about the story? Maybe you can think of a question that noone else has ever thought of before. Dr. Ike knows a lot about the story, so she may be able to answer your questions, and then again, maybe you can stump her (think of a question she does not have the answer to). If you think of questions about the story, bring your questions to your teacher. Your teacher can then send your questions to us in an email, and then Dr. Ike will send an email back to your teacher with her answers.

Teacher's Notes

Lesson: Good Questions

Have the students think about the "First Colors" story and draw out questions from them in a group discussion. Specify that we do want questions about the story but we do not want questions about our company (such as "what is Ike's favorite color", "how long have you been doing theater, etc.) or about the production (such as "how long did it take to make the alligator prop?). We try to answer the company and production questions in our Q and A session at the end of the show. The questions we want to come out of this lesson should be about the story itself or about the history and cultural context of the story.

What we are after are imaginative, genuine and specific questions from a child's perspective, even if they would seem unusual or provocative to an adult. To help draw out specific questions, it may help to remind them of particular parts of the story, to focus their perspective. For example, simply asking the children "do you have any questions about the story?" may draw blank stares, but if you ask if they have any questions about Ehecatl (the Lord of the Wind), that may spark something. With older students, you may be able to discuss what makes a question "good" (specificity, originality...).

Once your students have brainstormed some questions, have them select some of the questions that they think are particularly good questions. If you still have a large number of questions, you may want to select the best of the best yourself, and then email them to us: info@magicalrain.com. We will send our answers through email, so that you can relay the answers to the students. In some cases, the questions may inspire new lesson ideas on this site. We also may display some selected questions and answers on the site.

Note that Dr. Ike is a storyteller, mythologist and a scholar of the cultures of Mesoamerica (ancient Mexico and Central America). For more info on Dr. Ike, see her Resume.

Objectives:

1. To get the students to develop their abilities at inquiry and research, which includes the ability to formulate good questions

2. To further refresh the students in their memory of the story

3. To help Magical Rain Theaterworks get a sense of the "pulse" of student responses to the story, which will help us in forming a curriculum of lessons that is responsive to the student's interests.