Fairy Tale Madness!

During March, our classroom theme has been Fairy Tales and it has been just magical! 

To begin the unit, we read some Fairy Tales and discussed what is it that makes a story a Fairy Tale. We decided that Fairy Tales have six themes in common. We then made these paddles so that whenever we read a story the students can raise them in the air when they are able to identify any of the elements. I found this was a great way to keep students engaged during story time and recall important details about a story.

We read one of my favorite books The Balloon Tree by Phoebe Gilman and then created our own Balloon Trees using pre-cut strips of brown construction paper and finger paint. The students first arranged and glued the brown paper strips into whatever shape of tree they wanted, and then used red, blue and yellow finger paint to create the balloons, including mixing the primary colors to create secondary ones.

 

 They had a lot of fun using their fingers to mix the colors

                                      

One of my favorite parts of this project is how each tree turned out  different, just like a real forest

For our next activity, we read the classic The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch. We used watercolors to paint our dragons in our favorite colors, and then after they had dried we cut them out.  We also wrote a short description about our dragons where the students chose a name for their dragon, and what they breathed instead of fire (because a fire breathing dragon is scary!). As our letter of the week was "C", both of their choices had to start with that sound. My personal favorite was Carl the Crab-breathing dragon. 

This activity took us a few days to compete, but the final project was well worth it.

We also spent a week reading The Three Little Pigs. I found a great package over at Pre-K Pages that basically got me through the week.

We finished this "mini-unit" on Friday by doing a simple Reader's Theatre of the story in which each student played a special role in our "production" including being set designers (we created the houses using bristol board and construction paper), costume designers (who made the masks) and then some of the more advanced readers learned the script with me and acted it out. It was super fun and successful, and they keep on asking me when we can "be movie makers again!"

The masks that we used can be found here. The students colored and cut them out, and the mounted them on cardboard headbands. I also have a very simple script I created that we used, and if you would like a copy, drop me an email and I'll send it to you!