Friends A frieze story about a man and a lion

Idea by Valen (7-year-old towards the end of her first year of English learning)

Drawings by Beatriz Lupiano (Valen’s teacher)

Script in collaboration (Valen and Beatriz)

In the jungle

It’s raining in the jungle. There’s a rainbow. There are lions in the bushes. They say “shshshshshsh”.

There’s a bear climbing a tree. There are yellow eyes in the bushes. A lion!! It smells the air.

In a different part of the jungle…

Two men are speaking.They’re happy.

The sun is shining.It’s yellow.

The lion and the man

The lion sees the man. It’s afraid and roars. The man isn’t afraid.

He says, “It’s OK, lion. Don’t be afraid”

The end?

The man and the lion are friends.

A giraffe’s eating leaves. A bird is flying.

How the story was madeThis version of the story is the original one. Valen and I didn’t get to colour it in.

I wanted to have a record of it as it was when we last met (I wanted her to have it as well).

I’ll apply colour to the story in the future and hope she likes it that way, too.We had a lot of fun creating it –she’d draw on the board and show me what she

wanted me to draw; she also asked questions about how to spell sounds, like the lion sniffing and the bushes moving. I asked questions about what the men were saying and whether she wanted a big sun or a small one, and flowers, whether it was sunny or raining, etc.

I copied the lion and the giraffe from a book with step-by-step instructions to draw animals, aimed at children. The stickers came in the book. When we saw them, we immediately wanted to add them. So Valen came up with the idea of lion’s eyes spying from the bushes.

We don’t know if the story is finished or if it will have another chapter. The basic idea was the friendship forged by the lion and the man.

Beatriz LupianoFebruary 2010 (the story in its non-digital form was created in November 2009) We hope you like it