Finishing Fairy Tales

Our fairy tale unit is coming to an end and so is our school year! Two weeks left for me. I'm getting so excited to summertime. It's always sad to say goodbye to my class each year but at the same time I'm so ready for a break. I'm excited to be with my boys all summer. We are making plans I tell you! 

Back to fairy tales. :) You know I'm all about comparing during this unit. This time, students compared two different fairy tales (as opposed to comparing two versions of the same fairy tale). We had just finished The 3 Billy Goats Gruff and The 3 Billy Goats Fluff.  I brought out some of the other fairy tales we had read and asked the students if they can make any text to text connections. They had so many ideas! I used two different worksheets for this writing activities. I let them choose this time. Both scaffold in different ways. Here are some of the things they came up with:

Three Billy Goats Gruff and Jack and the Beanstalk both have mean giants (well troll is close to giant).

Three Billy Goats Gruff and Three Pigs: last pig tricks the wolf and the last goat tricks the troll, first two pigs ran away and first two goats run away (sort of), and the good characters didn't get eaten. 

Three Billy Goats Gruff and Trouble with Trolls (remember our Jan Brett unit?): I was excited about this connection because it was from another author study!

3 Little Pigs and 3 Billy Goats: both have three and both want to go somewhere but someone bad is stopping them.

This student compared the story of The Three Billy Goats Gruff to the play that he had seen in kindergarten. I thought that was pretty cool. 

We also read Hansel and Gretel and did this problem and solution map:

I LOVED this writing activity! We all talked about "bad" characters. We had read a bunch of books that show the perspective of that bad character. All of them are so good!

    

We reviewed what their side of the story was for each fairy tale and then brainstormed some ideas about bad characters in other fairy tales. For this activity, students wrote about a "bad" character and defended their actions. It was pretty fun to read these. :)

This was our first step:

 

The they chose one character and wrote about it:

 

And here's a few Goldilocks activities:

 

These are all from my fairy tale unit.