-I prepped for this unit far earlier in advance than any person should have but I couldn’t help myself there was just so much fascinating material to explore. Although I would have loved to have the student’s write fairy tales of their own I realized that because of time and the fact that we wrote stories already for our Laura Numeroff Author Study unit I thought instead we would focus on character development and having the students exposed to a variety of fairy tales from all over the world. We have started reading a few fairy tales and are starting to familiarize ourselves on what makes a fairy tale and characters within a fairy tale. We’ve read Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Thumbellina, The Gingerbread Man, and some variations of Jack and the Beanstalk. I found a cute book called Kate and the Beanstalk which puts the protagonist in a much more favorable and heroic light than Jack (Kate takes back the items the giant has stolen from others instead of Jack who steals them from the giant). And another fantastic book called Watch out Jack, the Giant’s back which is a hilarious sequel to Jack and the Beanstalk.
Fairy Tale Elements – As we read our stories we pick out all the elements we can find that makes the story a fairy tale!
-using some iPad apps for the students to explore fairy tales on an interactive level. This week we created our own fairy tale characters and started thinking of some words to describe their unique personalities!
-At the end of the unit students created puppets and did fairy tale puppet shows in groups!
–