Head, Body, Legs: A Story from Liberia

Summary: "Head, Body, Legs" is a traditional literature story from Liberia. The characters Head, Arms, Body, and Legs are all separated in the beginning. On their own, they are unable to complete simple tasks, such as Head not being able to retrieve cherries from a tree to eat. As the story progresses, the different body parts all link up. They decide that they work best together (the sum is greater than its individual parts).
Review: Although this is an ancient folklore, this was my first time reading this story. That being said, I really enjoyed it from start to finish. There is a great message that comes from it: that the body is at its best when all individual parts are working together. For example, a head needs to be fed by arms. show more Young children will love reading this, not to mention looking at the colorful pictures! show less

Head, Body, and Legs is a cute Liberian folktale about the human body and how it came to be. In this story the head starts off alone and rolling around eating grass and mushrooms, however he began to thinking about what it would be like to eat cherries from a tree. That is when Arms comes and attaches to the Head. They then acquire a body and legs. Originally all of the parts were out of place so they swapped around until they created the correct human form.

The first thing that stuck out to me about this book is the illustrations. I think they will really catch the children' eyes. This book would nice fun book to read. It could also be used to teach body parts, there's a lot of potential in a variety of questions to be asked. The language is simple and the story is short so this would be good for younger audiences. I think it is interesting that the author wrote the book with the characters being the body parts and saying "said head" instead of the head said.

All the body parts are separate; head sleeps under a cherry tree but since he can never reach the cherries, he calls on arms to help him. As each body part joins to the next, they find that it really does matter that they each do their own speciality, especially after falling in the river and being chased by a crocodile. In cooperation, they find perfection, and head finally gets to eat something good, a mango!

This Liberian folktale tells the story of how our head, arms, body and legs all came together. This story highlights the use of teamwork as well and I think that this book would be perfect for a younger childs science class. The pictures in this book are also very African centered and awesome. I would recommend this book to any lower grade teachers.

This is a story from the Dan people of northeastern Liberia about how each part of the body is put together to foster the importance of cooperation. The head encounters other body parts as he goes about his day. They discover that when they work together they are able to accomplish much more. Wonderful for PK to talk about body parts and cooperation.

I liked this book because it was geared towards younger children. I would be able to read this to a class of kindergardeners and have them enjoy it. You could have each child touch that part of their body when it showed up in the story. This was a very cute book that would be beneficial in a classroom setting.