Second Grade's Fairy Tale Unit

“Fairy tales communicate the following message to children: a struggle against severe difficulties in life is unavoidable, is an intrinsic part of human existence-but that if one does not shy away, but steadfastly meets unexpected and often unjust hardships, on e masters all obstacles and at the end emerges victorious.” –Brunot Bettelheim The Uses of Enchantment

There are many intelligent words written that urge parents and educators not to skip over classic fairy tales. The above words are the ones that inspired the implementation of a fairytale unit in the 2^nd grade.

Over the past few weeks the Second Grade class has been immersed in a fairy tale unit where they have been re-introduced to some of the most well known tales, which include: Thumbelina, Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Rapunzel.  The children have become very familiar with the seven elements of a fairy tale: setting, plot, characters, problem/solution, magic, and theme.   Each day during, reader’s workshop, the children investigated a specific element within a tale.  Through rich literature discussions a deeper meaning of each element immerged. If you stepped into the room on Monday you would have heard children depicting the characters in a story based on the character’s spoken words or actions. The board read:

Readers discover a character’s values/qualities by noticing actions and spoken words in the text.

The children replied:

“Snow White is kind. My evidence is that in the book it says she has a gentle tone.”

 “I think Snow White is gullible. My evidence for this is because she got fooled by her Step mother. When the Queen disguised herself as the farmer’s wife she took the apple.” 

 “The Seven Dwarfs were protective. The book said that the seven dwarfs each took turns guarding the coffin.”

“I agree that she was protective because they said to snow white not to answer the door so that she would stay safe.”

"The Queen is envious. When she was talking to the mirror the mirror said she wasn’t as fair as snow white. I think she was envious because she then said “Snow White shall die!”

While the stories themselves are teaching lessons of inner strength and good character today Miss Bond and Miss Rancourt were using these stories to teach children the important comprehension skill of proving their thoughts by gathering specific evidence from a text.