Fairy Tale Ideas

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Home : 2005 : May : 16

Fairy Tale Ideas
By Gretchen

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.