Week 10 Reading Notes: Tejas Legends

I chose to read the Tejas Legends for week 10 readings. I was excited about this because these stories were originally from east Texas. I've spent some time in east Texas, and so I thought it would be really cool to be able to read stories when I could actually picture the place in which they were written. My favorite of the stories was "Why the woodpecker pecks," and so I decided to base my reading notes off of this. I chose to focus on the beauty of how this story was written and pick out some of my favorite sentences from this story.

• "a Tap! Tap! Tap! sounding in the top of a dead tree..." I love how they used onomatopoeia in the very first sentence so that readers could immediately picture and hear the sound that a woodpecker makes. 
• "looking just like a little man in a black coat and a red hat." This allows readers to visually picture how the woodpecker looks after hearing its noise in the first sentence. 
• I love the way the author uses sounds and imagery in order for readers to truly feel what is going on in the story. 
• "when the wolves were howling far off on the desert," Again, this is another instance in which the author does a great job giving sensory to the readers. 
• "By the light of the bright stars he could see the buttons growing on the plants" I think this is so beautifully written because I can almost see the stars above an empty desert, and I can picture how they would give just enough light to see the buds on the plants. 
• "The black robes they were wearing turned into black feathers, and the red feathers they wore in their hair turned into the red head of the woodpeckers." This is a great parallel between one of the first sentences of how the woodpeckers look compared to how they became actual birds.

 How the Indians became Woodpeckers

Bibliograpy: When the Storm God Rides: Tejas and Other Indian Legends retold by Florence Stratton and illustrated by Berniece Burrough (1936).