Idioms and the Oral Tradition

 

We have been discussing just how powerful and important storytelling can be and how it can give us great insight into different cultures. When reading How the Snake Got Poison, by Zora Neale Hurston, the class realized that using dialect in the retelling of a folk tale can honor oral tradition by helping the reader to "hear" how the story was first told. In How the Snake Got Poison, the dialect helped reflect the roots of African American folklore.

We also began to discuss idioms and how they play a role in oral tradition. An idiom is a form of expression natural to a language, person, or group of people and often times it can be difficult to understand if you are not a part of the particular culture were the idiom originated. In class today, pictures representing various idioms in our culture where spread out around the room and students worked eagerly to try and figure out which idiom each picture represented. 

 Take a look below:

The real challenge presented itself when students had to describe what the idiom meant!