I've written about the Dolch reading system before (see post: Once There Was a Coyote), and I am honestly a fan. I wish that they had provided some notes for the stories to help put them in context along with some bibliography, but the books do not contain notes or references. Still, they really are a pleasure to read, and are especially good not just for young readers but also for English-language-learners of any age. I hope to learn how to write my own Dolch-style stories with limited vocabulary. That's not something I have ever tried to do, but it is a writing challenge that I think I would enjoy!
The book contains stories from China, Tibet, Korea, Japan, India, and indonesia, and of the 3 stories from Indonesia, there is one story about the trickster mouse-deer who is called Kantchil here. This is the same story of Kantchil in the pit that you can find in The Sacred Banana Leaf book that I wrote about yesterday, and it is also the title story of Courlander's Kantchil's Lime Pit and Other Stories From Indonesia (I'm 99% certain that Courlander's book was the source used by the Dolches). Whatever the source, it really is a perfect little trickster story, so I am glad to find it in so many different versions. I like how Dolch's version ends here: "And he ran away laughing." That is the ending for literally thousands of trickster stories around the world, including this wonderful little story about the mouse-deer of Indonesia.
The illustrations are by Beulah Jackson, who illustrated several of these Dolch readers. You have to look hard to see the mouse-deer; he's trapped down in the pit with the other animals by this point in the story:
So, since we have these other versions of the story to compare, you can get a sense of what the Dolch easy-reading approach is like. I am a fan, and I was excited to see that there is a Dolch mouse-deer story to include this week... and you'll find some other trickster stories in this book too of course, like the famous story of the tiger, the brahmin, and the jackal.
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