Y'all I love teaching with Fairy Tales SO, SO much! I know I've said it before, but it's probably one my favorite unit to teach all year!! There's a TON you can do with it and the kids absolutely LOVE it!! There's some great ideas out there and a ton of resources!
Here are the tales we focused on:
Rapunzel
Three Billy Goats Gruff
Three Little Pigs
Little Red Riding Hood
Jack and the Beanstalk
Goldilocks and the Three Bears
Rumpelstiltskin
Princess and the Pea
I made this bubble map to track the elements of each fairy tale it worked so well. My students really grasped the concept I was trying to cover doing this with each story.
This is what each little bubble may look like...I photocopied the books I included on my map and shrunk them down to 25%. I cut them out and put them on a bubble so we could track each story we were working on. Also, it made more sense to the kids to have the cover of the book there so they could easily compare stories.
Each year we practice measuring and counting with Rapunzel. Each student makes a tower with rapunzel. Then, I have them come up 1 at a time and cut a piece of yarn. they have to measure the "hair" and tell if the piece they cut is shorter or longer than Rapunzel's hair. We do this in a couple of theme sessions...about 1 hour total to finish the project.
You can find this activity HERE.
The Three Little Pigs
After reading both sides of the story...The Three Little Pigs and The True Story of The There
We made these cute little retelling houses from milk cartons. I saw this idea HERE.
THEN...one of my smarties said, "Hey, we can keep our retelling puppets in our carton"...
Um, how smart are you?!?! It worked perfectly!! :) I was originally thinking to glue a "pocket" on the back to store the puppets, but, Duh...use the opening already there! :)
Each side has a different look for retelling...straw, sticks, and bricks...then the back has the title of the story.
We grabbed a partner and retold the story to each other.
The Three Billy Goats Gruff!
I found this cute little retelling mat HERE...we tweaked it a bit and had so much fun using it!
When I saw Deanna's idea of constructing bridges using toothpicks and gumdrops I knew we had to give it a try. I was a little skeptical of my little friends doing this completely independently...BUT I was pleasantly surprised and how they thought out their ideas and put it to life!
They did awesome on these little projects!
I think we may have a civil engineer on our hands with this one...
To retell this story we used these little props, a styrofoam cup, and a green pipe cleaner.
I showed the students how to insert the pipe cleaner in the BOTTOM of the cup. This was our beanstalk. Then, we poked holes in the castle and put it on the pipe cleaner at the top. Then, we simply used the puppets to retell the story with a friend. This is a really long story with a LOT of details.
I gave them 5 "magic beans" (jelly beans). I used this as a tactic to try to get them to remember details. For each jelly bean I told them they needed to add a detail from the story. I also added that their story should have a beginning and an ending. 
And, the little cup keeps all their pieces together. :)
TEACHER TIP: I have each student write their name on the back of EACH piece b/c I usually have at least 1 or more kiddos drop them and end up not having what they need to retell. It takes a smidge longer to do this, but worth it. I do this with any story that has pieces all year.
Castle Crates
I wanted a cute way to send home all of their retelling props that would keep them all in one place and a fun way to present these to their parents for all the hard work they had put into this. I love the idea I had of making castles from shoe boxes. And, so did they kids. They loved making their very own little castle to hold all their "stuff". And, it was super easy to carry home so they could retell these fun stories to their parents! We painted the entire shoe box gray and then added some fun foam stickers to decorate.
The Princess and the Pea
After reading this story, we made this chart about our ideas of what a real princes would be able to do. Next, we made the little craft below. This idea came from HERE.
We make these cute little Red Riding Hood's each year. These have nothing to do with retelling, but they are fun to practice blends. Or you could tweak it to match skills you are working on.
Many of you have asked if this is in my store. It isn't yet...my hopes are to get it in there one day, but y'all, I'm just a busy mom of 3 and I haven't had time to get around to it. :) One day...
Centers
I have blogged about some of my Fairy Tale centers before...You can find them in my Fairy Tale Fun pack.
Integrating literacy with math...sight words, color words, counting and number recognition all in one center...I love these kind!
We are practicing hard on addition...this was super fun! How many beans can Jack's hand hold?
Teen number words...
Ordering by 10's with Rapunzel's Tower
Reading nonsense and real words with Goldilocks
Our weekly word family word sort...they loved the little wands!
My version of a rhyming center...matching a word we can read to a picture...rhyming is SO hard for my kinders, especially EL's...is it for yours?
Beginning and Ending sounds...they really have to listen to the stretched out word and concentrate to hear both sounds
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Spelling CVC words
Thanks for reading my blog! I hope you found something you could incorporate into your fairy tale unit!
