Roll a Fairy Tale

Today we went as a school to see a performance of "Into the Woods" at a local high school. For those of you that are not familiar with the show, it is a show comprised of a mix of different fairy tales. Thus, I found it to be a perfect opportunity to embark on a short fairy tale unit in class!

We spent the past week and a half learning about fairy tale characteristics and analyzing several fairy tales in search of examples of these elements. 

Your Spanish lesson for the day :)

Cenicienta = Cinderella, Blancanieves = Snow White, Juan y los frijoles mágicos = Jack and the Beanstalk

After the show today, we then worked to learn a new activity that I will be placing in our "Work on Writing" center, called "Roll a Fairy Tale".  The purpose of this activity is for students to select the various story elements necessary to write their own fairy tale. The kicker is the story elements will be determined by the roll of a die!

Here are the pages necessary for the activity:

1. The elements sheet (it comes in English too :)). Students will roll a die four times, once for each category to determine which they will use to create their fairy tale.

2. They will then create their story on this writing page complete with a fairy tale intro! (It comes in Spanish too :))

I copy the pages back to back so that the students can refer to the planning page while they write. I also ask my students to circle the elements after rolling the die so they remember what they need to use.

Here are some examples of my own students' writing from today in class. They did a great job for their first stab at it!

(Once upon a time there was a boy names Bob and his mom Ally, the queen. They lived in a castle and his mother told him to do everything that she told him to do. His mom then told him to go outside to pick flowers and when he went outside he saw a magic wand and he used it to make all of his dreams come true and he lived "happily ever after".)

I had to include this next one too because it just cracks me up...ohh a second graders sense of humor..

PS. One of my native English speaker's wrote this one!

(Once upon a time there was a princess named Mrs. Toots-a-lot (I kid you not this is what he wrote ;)). But an old woman wanted the princess for herself because the princess was very beautiful. One day the princess saw a magic ninja and the ninja did not like the old woman either. So both took all of the food from the old woman and the old woman died. Then they lived happily ever after!). 

Grab a copy of the activity for your classroom for free by clicking on the image below.