Dessert: Recombinant Folk Tale

Directions

Request that each participant read the two folk tales and then ask them to describe the solution to each folk tale.
Note to leader:
Answer to folktale in Handout 5.5. page 1: Frog's swimming around began to churn the cream into soft fresh butter.
Answer to folktale in Handout 5.5. page 2: Frog saw the sunlight reflecting off the sides of the mountain in the west while Deer was watching the plain in the east. Mountains, being higher, always catch the suns rays first as the earth turns to face the sun.

After they describe the solutions, read or paraphrase the following.

Now you are going to create recombinant folktales from the two folktales in the handouts. You will do that by cutting out text from both stories and recombining them into new stories. But you can’t choose just any text to exchange - only text that begins and ends with the same words.

Look at the handout with the two folktales,"The Frog" and "Sunrise" and find the following phrases, "the sides of the" and "hours and hours". These are the target sites. Use scissors and tape to remove the text between the target sites in the two stories and switch them. The new story is called a "recombinant" story.

After participants finish the exchange, ask them to look at their recombinant stories.

• Explain why you think the new fairytale is considered a recombinant story.

• Describe what happened to the story when the exchanges were made.

• Explain what effects might occur if the target site was only one word, like "frog", instead of several words.
  

• What would be the consequences if the replaced text was only one word instead of full sentences?