The Canterbury Tales: Creative Story Telling
By: Luke Romano

In class we recently finished our unit on the Canterbury Tales. Now since there was so many stories in this book, Mrs. Kopp (our teacher) came up with an extremely efficient , creative, and fun way for us to learn the different tales! What her idea was, was to join in groups and read one story that you selected and find a unique way to present it to the class so its one-entertaining and two-telling the tale. My partner, Beck Godzenovich and I had the ingenious idea to turn our presentation into a sock puppet show. We believed that this childish and whimsical setting would be able to relax the audience and allow them to retain key moments by bringing them out in the play. This would work as they would say," Hey remember when..." and they would say the moment and thus remembering our plot to the friars tale. Now this is one example of a type of story telling, the creative ideas that were created in my class surprising. When I first went into the presentations I was expecting to see the same thing over and over again with different plots, but after seeing two, I realized how different they could really be. I saw raps, reality TV shows, Star Wars imitation, children books and the list goes on. And with Mrs. Kopp's idea to present them how we did, I learned much more about the stories then if I was just assigned to read the tales. Alas, we did not have enough groups in our class to learn all of the stories that are in the Canterbury Tales, but I did gain information on a sufficient amount of the stories and I found them quite interesting. Along with finding them interesting I did find many funny with groups putting a comedic twist on their story telling which helped me remember key parts of the play that were the funniest. So, I'm extremely glad we did this project and I have a strong feeling, I'm not the only one.

My Canterbury Tale by Joseph Dempsey

As we all know from our introduction to this unit, the Canterbury tales were tales told by English immigrants to pass the time on their journey to Canterbury. If I were one of those immigrants, this is the short story I would tell:

"As dinner approaches on Christmas Eve, my stomach was already doing barrel rolls. Although I had hardly eaten anything that day due to the fast, my stomach was still not craving this food. We sat down to say grace, and then I hesitantly dug in. The gooey, purple kidney beans were enough to drive anyone away from the traditional meal. Next up was the mushroom barley soup. We usually empty our bowls of this instantaneously (by shoveling it into my brother's bowl who gladly eats it). By this time I needed a break so I consumed the plainest thing I could find-the fried fish. After I managed to get that down, I moved on to the tolerable foods-the potatoes with sauerkraut, and the bobal'ky (bub-all-key, small bread balls covers in honey). These I devoured as if they were candy. Finally, the meal was finished and I got to relax and be excited for all the delicious foods for the next day. However, that joyous thought was instantly destroyed by the thought that I would have to do that all again next year."

 Even with that said, I DO actually look forward to this dinner known as Velija (vuh-lee-a). This tradition will be one of the greatest memories of my childhood and teen years. The suffering that my family and I (mainly my cousins) go through and the fun we have at the table while eating it is unforgettable.

Here are pictures of the 5 foods:

Bobal'ky:
 
Potatoes:



















Mushroom Barley Soup:
 
Fish:
Really any old fried fish
Beans:
Could not find a picture (trust me, they look disgusting)