Fairy Tales

I, too, am designing a unit on fairy tales only my activity will conclude with a series of three plays presented at our PTO meeting for April.
We are currently measuring in non standard units, and I am planning to have the children answer the question. How long is Rapunzels's Hair? They will be estimating and measuring a braid of yarn that has been secured with ribbon. They will measure with such things as paper clips, unifix cubes and flat toothpicks. We will discuss why one my be 30 unifix cubes long, but also be 60 paper clips long...the comparison is great for discussion.
We will also be making a beanstalk of letters after reading Jack and the Beanstalk. We will place the letters in alphabetical order. It's a good way to review letters with our now emergent readers.
Hope these two ideas help. I would appreciate a note letting me know if you decide to use them, and how they worked for you
Good Luck
Kay

I'm just finishing a fairy tale unit, and it was so much fun! I read them The Jolly Postman, and we made our own Jolly Postman books, with letters from one character to another (ex. Snow White to dwarves after marriage to Prince Charming). We read James Marshall's Three Little Pigs, The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, and The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig, and they wrote their own newspaper article in The Daily Wolf or The Daily Pig about what happened. We've made Wanted posters for villains, puppets, and Eric Carle-ish dragons. You can also compare cross-cultural fairy tales, like Red Riding Hood and the Chinese Lon Po Po, or the many versions of Cinderella. They raise the issue of what a heroine is -- in some of the stories she's simply beautiful and obedient; in others, like Cindy Ellen, she requires gumption; others, like the Ojibway Rough Face Girl, are much deeper and more powerful stories. You can investigate the many moral issues in the stories too, like is it okay for Jack to steal from the giant? Is the giant really a villain? (The heroine of the more modern Kate and the Beanstalk is much more justified stealing.) We compared the treatment of animals in The Frog Prince and the native story Frog Girl too. We've also played Fairy Tale charades. It's an incredibly rich subject.

1. Cinderellla
2. Jack and the Bean Stalk
3. The Three Little Pigs
4. The Three Bears


1. Discuss that Cinderella wanted very much to attend the ball, but her family would not let her. Ask your students if they have ever wanted something very badly that someone did not want them to have. Ask how they overcame it. Set a table up in the front of the class with a variety of objects on it. Discuss how each object could be transformed into something that could help a student reach a goal. Suggestions could be a balloon, a toy boat, a shovel, a stuffed animal, a book, etc.

Rely strongly on verbal discussion for this activity, but perhaps students could prepare individual stories and illustrations about their object's transformation and/or how they met their goal. ie: A balloon could be a hot air balloon that carried a student to Grandma's house.

2. Have a Beanstalk Race. Each student plant a bean seed and provide daily maintainence. Whoever's stalk is the tallest by the end of the year wins a treasure! could be gold coins like chocolate or something else appropriate.

3. I don't know what sort of materials you have access to, but you could construct houses. Use shoe boxes, popsicle sticks, twigs from outside, etc.

If you had access to kitchen materials and were allowed to use food, you could bring in or ask students to supply some canned goods to make "wolf stew." In reality, it could just be veggie stew or something, but you could practice measuring ingredients. If you can't use real food, you could use magazine cut outs and/or food labels to fill a bulletin board sized pot with the ingredients to make wolf stew.

4. You could round up a collection of items in triplicate at the front of the class. You could allow children to test the materials and decide either individually or as a group if the items are too big, too small, or just right. ie: chairs, a jacket, a hat, spoons, cups, or even blankets (too rough, too light, just right)

I. In general, you could perform puppet shows using puppets constructed out of brown or white paper lunch sacks. You could use clay or other materials to create dioramas.

II. I don't know the extent of your different versions, but international versions of the tales are lots of fun. Lon Po Po is the Chinese version of Little Red Riding Hood and Aschenputtel is the German version of Cinderella. If you did some international versions, you could teach a few simple words from the language such as mom dad child bear table school, etc. enchantedlearning.com has lots of foreign language sheets. You could draw or use cutouts of the object and then surround it with the different versions of the word. ie: picture of a cat surrounded by cat, el gato, chat. Be sure to use plenty of maps to illustrate the various locations of the stories in relation to where the kids are.

III. And lastly, you can always write your own fairy tales.

1. Write in script format and perform a play or readers theater.
2. Do a puppet show.
3. Read the various versions and do a Venn Diagram to compare/contrast.
4. Watch a movie versus the book and then compare.
5. Have students choose a character to dress up as after reading all the books. They can pretend to be the character.
6. Write a story with a different ending.
7. Combine two fairy tales together.
8. Make their favorite puppet and then do a puppet parade.

Cinderella- have chores for the students to do.
~clean board
~sweep/vacuum the floor
~take out trash, etc.

Jack and the Beanstalk-
~make a beanstalk out of butcher paper
~decorate a bean and make it magical

The Three Little Pigs-
~have a team of three make a diaroma for each type of house. Then have them retell the story.

The Three Bears-
~have 3 chairs (too small, just right, too big)
~ eat oatmeal

Yes I do teach fairy tales as a unit and in fact will be doing my unit in the next few months. I haven't looked through my "stuff" so I am not sure what I am doing this year as I like to change things a bit every year. Some things I do for the unit are....

- create a character chart where we make a list of all the characters we read about and whether they are "good" or "evil" characters.

- create a list of fairy tale words - I put on a chart for students to use in their writing.

- we read quite a few stories that have different versions and then vote on which version we liked best.

- for art I have them create a poster for their favorite story.

- we usually write two stories. The first one is a retelling of a popular story like The three little pigs or Little Red Riding Hood. This I find helps some of the weaker students understand sequence better. Then I have them write their own story - this is always towards the end of the unit.

- I also have a number of little books that I can photocopy and other materials that are fun to use.

If you want, email me directly and when I make copies of all my things I'll be using I'll send you a care package as well.

A fractured fairytale is an original fairytale that is re-written with a twist. They are usually humorous. Some of my favorites are:
The True Story of the Three Little Pigs By A. Wolf

The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales
(Jon Scieszka)

Revolting Rhymes
(Roald Dahl)

And the Dish Ran Away With the Spoon
(Janet Stevens)

Bubba the Cowboy Prince: A Fractured Texas Tale
(Helen Ketteman) *He has a fairy god-cow! *

Dinorella: A Prehistoric Fairytale
(Pamela Duncan Edwards) *Fairydactyl! *

There are zillions more. There is an actual book called Fractured Fairy Tales (A. J. Jacobs) from "Rocky & Bullwinkle"

I don't have any actual lesson plans. I just make sure I expose them as many as I can. Also, I learned my first year doing this unit that you can't expect that all students will be familiar with even the most common traditional farytales. I couldn't understand why some students just weren't 'getting it'. Finally I read the traditional version (wich I should have done first!) and I could practically see the lightbulbs over their heads.

Hope this helps!

Kids really enjoy listening to fairy tales followed by fractured fairy tales. The Frog Prince Continued by Jon Sciezca is hysterical. When we do these, we write our own fractured fairy tales, bringing the characters into modern day with modern problems. Kids can be really creative and funny when they write these. I usually have them begin with a story map to plan what the story will be about. They list which characters they'll use and what fairy tales they're from. Then, they choose a setting and a major problem. Before they begin writing, they get with a partner and share their story map so they can get even more (funny) ideas. Usually they get so wound up, they can't wait to actually write it. Good luck!

I have had students act out their own versions of traditional tales. I put a bunch of story titles in a hat. Each group pulls a story and comes up with their own script. A good way to get the creativity going is with a box of costumes/props. Fill it with things that could be used to act out the various stories - hats, aprons, baskets, artificial flowers and fruit, pig noses, wolf ears, etc. Show all costumes/props to the whole class and tell each group to think about what would make their story come to life. Each group has access to all props/costumes when they present their tale. I've only done this with older kids but I think it could be done in 4th grade. You would just need more time given for script writing and rehearsal.

My kids love making "fractured Fairy Tales". They read a fairy tale and change the ending or the characters, or whatever to make it a different story. Or they like to tell the story from a different character's point of view--nobody ever asked The Wicked Stepmother and daughters why they had it in for Cinderella, you know?

Also, I have a fractured fairy tale book of plays I do with my kids. I think I got it from Scholastic. The kids love the stories and really love acting it out for the school!

This summer I did a unit on fairy tales for 5-6 graders and one of the stories we read was The 3 Little Pigs. I was skeptical but they really got into it. One thing I did was make a pig cut-out for each one. We then read the poem "This Little Piggy Went to Market" and for the last line, they had to substitute where their pig would go and then dress their pig for that place. I used old lace and material scraps, paper, markers, any art material I could find. They loved it! Pigs went to the beach in Hawaii, to a Lakers game, to a rodeo, to a ball in a tux, to a business lunch, you name it. They then traced their foot and cut it out. They then made a smaller foot to go inside (which you could do ahead of time) and wrote the poem on it, replacing the last line with their own place. We then hung them in the hall for the other classes to visit. There are some cute reader's theaters for younger students on the web and a lot are fairy tales. For Cinderella, we read "Bigfoot Cinderella" just for enjoyment - along with about 15 other Cinderella stories. We read African ones and made African food dishes, you could make African masks. We read an Eskimo story and you could make igloos from sugar cubes. We also constructed houses for the 3 little pigs - one group with popsicle sticks, one from toothpicks, one with sugar cubes, and one with Easter grass and then using a hair dryer we tried to blow them in like the wolf. The only other things they could use were paper clips, glue and straws to hold them together. They were also given a small piece of paper to use as a roof. Littler ones could just make houses from sugar cubes or sticks.

The three little pigs is always a good unit to use with fractured fairy tales because the students are so famailiar with the original version of The Three Little Pigs. The books I use are:
The True Story of the Three Little Pigs.
The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig.
The Big Bad Wolf is Good
The Three Little Javelinas.
You can use any of these stories to compare and contrast with a venn diagram or even use a matrix with fairy tale elements and see if these fractured fairy tales have all the elements of a traditional fairy tale. Cinderella is also a good story to use. Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters, Cindy Ellen, CinderEdna, CinderHazel, The Paper Bag Princess are some of the books you could use.

Yeh-Shen (from China)
Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters (African),The Rough-Face Girl (Native American),The Egyptian Cinderella,Prince Cinders,Dinorella,
Cinderella Penguin,Cinder Elly,Cinderella Bigfoot
1.Create a Venn diagram comparing the stories Cinderella and any other version listed above. 2.Use the Venn diagram to write a comparative essay.3. Cause and Effect 4. How did the Cinderella chaacter's life change from the beginning of the story to the end?5. Realism and Fantasy 6.Follow-up research: penguins, snakes in Africa, dinosaurs7. Complete graphic organizer with details from the stories: clothes, family, chores, magic, happy endings 8. Sequence Chain of Events