Fairy tale ideas

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Home : 2002 : March : 10

Fairy tale ideas
By Pat

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.