Winter arrived at our playground like a child in dress-up clothes. At first it draped itself in snowy white softness, then turned into cold rain that coated our playground with ice, before morphing into wind-driven ice pellets that pecked at our unprotected faces. But Winter’s persona was not yet complete. It changed again into a dress of muddle puddle brown as snow and ice melted changing both its colour and form.
For some children in our class, especially those who were new immigrants to Canada from warmer climes, this was all new. Winter clothing, and how to dress themselves for winter’s changing whims was mystifying. What were snowpants? How could they get them on without the shoulder straps getting caught between their legs? Mittens, the smallest and most manageable of the outdoor gear, captured their attention.
Mittens, they began to understand, offered benefits and challenges. Mittens could keep their hands more comfortable from the cold. They could also make doing up zippers or putting on boots challenging. It wasn’t long before they also learned that mittens were hard to keep track of. Somehow it was easy to drop a single mitten and lose sight of it on the playground or in the hallway, or even have it disappear inside the dark cavern of their backpack.
It was in this context that we began reading the story of The Mitten, a Ukrainian folktale retold and illustrated by Jan Brett. Before sharing the story, we considered how the mittens in the story were made. We looked at knitting needles and yarn to get an idea of how Baba, the grandma in the story, made mittens for her grandson, Nicki, without buying them in a store. We thought about our own mittens and how they were made to be just the right size for our hands.
Our first reading of the story was filled with pauses as unfamiliar animals appeared in the tale. With each turn of the page and introduction of a new animal, we were sure that there was simply no room for yet another animal to crawl into the mitten. And yet, as the tale progressed, we learned that each animal was drawn to the warmth and coziness of the mitten. All eight animals miraculously found their way inside the mitten including a small fieldmouse that cuddled up on bear’s nose. Mouse’s whiskers tickled the bear’s nose precipitating bear’s tumultuous sneeze that sent animals and mitten flying into the air. Nikki spied his lost mitten midair. The lost is found. But a mystery formed in Baba’s mind. Why was one mitten so much larger than the other?
Our second reading of The Mitten was a retell that offered the children for whom English is a second language an opportunity to engage more easily. We used a hand-held white board and dry erase marker to trace around two mitten shapes that were the same size. We recalled how the story began and how animals discovered the cozy mitten. Using laminated photos of the animals in the story we brought each animal in turn from their hidden spot on the back of the whiteboard to the front of the whiteboard and attached each animal inside one of the mittens. At first, it was easy to fit them into the mitten.
But as the story progressed, it was soon impossible. The outline of the mitten was too small. Again and again, we needed to erase the edges of the mitten to redraw a larger mitten that would accommodate the size and quantity of animals inside. At the end of the story, when bear’s big sneeze catapults all the animals and the mitten into the air, the mitten outline is once again empty. The outline of this mitten – enlarged and misshapen – is in sharp contrast to the size and shape of the other mitten still outlined on the white board.
As story readers and re-tellers, we felt a little smug. The children and I had inside knowledge of what had happened to the mitten Nicki had temporarily lost. We knew exactly why one mitten was so much larger than the other mitten. For Baba and Nicki, however, it remained a complete mystery.
And we wondered, what might Baba’s theories be about why one mitten had suddenly grown so big?
Imagining Baba’s perspective, what new story could we draw, sculpt, or tell with words or loose parts about The Mitten That Grew?
