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The Lake of Monsters is a story for kids two to five years old. It is a personalized story for kids about a brief true story of monsters.
This story for kids online stimulates the fantasy while it reinforces the vocabulary of the children.
Let us see the analysis of this brief story for kids and commentary about the characteristics and principal elements of its structure:
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In spite of the title stories of monsters for kids, it is not a scary or horror story because of the fantastic character that it has and the funny and entertaining monsters that take part in it.
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A common characteristic to all the collection of free short stories for kids in this online book is to contain love stories or tales, even if it isn’t always apparent at first glance. Love is the context or background that gives cohesion to all the stories, its interpretation and its assimilation; it is even a tool, necessary to understand the baddies.
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The brief or short stories about love or with a happy ending for babies and small children are ideal for bedtime in the form of spoken tales, because they put them in a state of relaxation ideal for a nice rest and an adequate functioning of the childlike brain in that state.
It would be good to point out that in spoken tales, above all in bedtime stories, even in the very short ones, often the boy or girl fall asleep before the story is finished. They have fallen asleep in a world of fantasy in which they have probably incorporated new elements to the script.
An important element is that the boys and girls should have the opportunity to choose the spoken tale or bedtime story or, at least, their opinion should always be taken into account.
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Even though all the free kids’ tales of this online collection are very brief, the extension of the spoken tale permits us to determine some particular goals. Normally they will be very elemental objectives but sufficient to the boys and girls who will be the listeners.
They are stories for little boys and girls; from 2 to 7 years old approximately, that’s why the style of the spoken tales is very simple on occasions, with very short sentences and quite elemental ideas.
Let it be noticed that the style of the tales about monsters is very simple, with very short sentences and quite basic ideas, like hunger, play, monsters and friendship.
The use of very similar words shows how the language, be it a short story in Spanish or any other language, sometimes uses similar structures for words with related concepts. An example of this characteristic would be the words “arañar, arrastrar, agarrar, amarrar, agachar, etc.” in the story for kids in Spanish The Lake of Monsters.
Also, the use of words formed with the root and a lot of derivatives teaches the configuration of a language in a fun way. In the original short stories in English the root has a more phonetic than graphic personality.
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Of course every child is a world, but my experience tells me that the most important element is not the technical quality of the personalized or original fairy tale, but the love that it manages to transmit.
I don’t mean to say that we shouldn’t tell traditional or classic stories for kids, because a lot of them are really great, but that they can be completed with original fairy tales closer to the boys or girls, making them value and ask for one type or another at bedtime with a spoken tale.
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The little ones are grateful for the attention and care that is given to them and they perceive the difference between classic or traditional tales and personalized original fairy tales, albeit vaguely and progressively.
Because it is based on a true story of children-monsters it is a rather personalized story. It is funny that the children may have certain identification with the monsters in the story.
One of the advantages of the personalized tales is that, when we facilitate the auto identification, the messages or morals arrive with a much higher intensity.
Another important element is to not do an explicit personalization contrary to the natural one, that is to say, one has to facilitate that the fantasy of the children complete the identification with total freedom.
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Normally, the images of the short stories online correspond to the characters or elements of the true stories. The images of the story are photos although on occasions these are altered so that they look like drawings.
The true story consisted of a walk around a large park which had a small lake. The photos are of the lake of the true story, and one can see that it does indeed look like a lake of monsters that provoked more fear and horror than the actual story.
In the tales based on true stories it is a good idea to perform the contrary process used on the personalized tales.
Little children feel strong and clever when they understand the messages and the relations between the story and the real world. For that opportunity that they are offered by these stories about life they feel grateful and they have a natural tendency to return the favor by accepting the moral of the story, if it is reasonable, of course.
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It is a funny, fantastic story with a moral, because it warns children about the dangers of getting too close to a lake with the excuse of the existence of monsters which eat kids.
At the same time, it is insinuated to them that whatever strange thing that children see must be told to their parents.
There are other morals more or less direct but I will leave them to the analysis of the story teller and the children’s sense.
THE LAKE OF MONSTERS
Once upon a time, in a little village near Brussels called Tervuren, there was a big park and in the middle of the park there was an enormous wood and in that wood, there was a dark and gloomy/sinister lake and in that lake there lived a Monster called M.
M had eaten all the other monsters who used to live in the lake and all the children who used to go near the side of the lake and so/for that reason, he had an enormous round tummy. It was so big that when the monster moved, it scraped along the bottom of the lake/ground and so that he could move better, he had to hold on to the branches of the trees around the lake and they were all broken and almost touching the water.
M the Monster was hungry; there was no more to eat; he had eaten all the monsters and the children didn't go near the side of the lake anymore because they were scared/afraid.
Until one day, near the lake, a group of children were playing football and one little boy kicked the ball so hard that it landed/stopped near one corner of the lake.
M, who was getting more and more hungry every day, looked at the round thing near the corner of the lake and thought: I could eat that. So he went to the corner, his tummy scraping along the ground and holding on to the branches of the trees and with one gulp/in one go/in one mouthful he swallowed the ball.
So the monsters and the children who were inside his tummy began to play a game of football and one monster kicked the ball so hard that it exploded/blew up. All the air inside the ball began to escape and the monster's tummy began to get bigger and bigger until it too exploded.
So all the monsters came out of the monster's tummy and all the children went running home to tell their parents "we're here at last" and to tell them everything that had happened.
M's tummy was not big and round anymore and it didn't touch the ground and he was thin.
He could walk without holding/grabbing on to the branches of the trees, but most of all he had friends.
There were more monsters in the lake and he could play with them.
So M thought "I'm not going to eat any more monsters or children.
And from that moment on, M only ate fruit from the trees near the lake
and when children went near the side of the lake, M gave them rides on his enormous tail.
And they all lived happily ever after
and now... SLEEP
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