Fairy Tales

I was supposed to blog about my fairy tale unit last week, but I lost the gusto to do so.  It was a two week unit... the first week was fairy tales and the second was prince and princess stories.  The kiddos worked so very hard and it took most of them an entire week to write their fairy tales {planning them out with characters, setting, and a problem/ solution, and then writing it out in story form}.  I was up to my eyeballs in fairy tales and after writing, we read them aloud to two of the Kindergarten classes in our building.  Each year I invite the Kinders to come hear our fairy tales.  My class enjoyed reading them and I hope they enjoyed hearing them.

Our librarian usually does a fairy tale lesson for first grade and she introduces the elements of fairy tales.  After that, I do a lot of reading fairy tales and folk tales.  We talked about the difference between the two and then we create a story whole group.  I typically pick a story line to follow and then we tweak the characters and story line.  It came out really funny!

This gave the kids confidence to do their own.  Some of them picked a fairy tale they knew and changed the story to fit them and then others started from scratch and made their own.  They all turned out really nice.  Here are tid bits of stories I took pictures of... some had great beginnings and a couple had funny endings.  

Our second week I shared some fairy tales based on a prince or princess.  We read the Frog Prince, Princess and the Pea, Cinderella, and the Paperbag Princess.  The Paperbag Princess was a different take on your typical fairy tale.  We then created stories about if we were a prince or a princess and made paperbag puppets to go with. 

"moon ring"  HA!  I love it. 

The paperbag prince/princess idea came from Pinterest.  There are so many creative and fun teachers out there.  Bless them for giving me my own ideas and others to copy!