Fairy Tales and Traditional Tale Resources

Fairy Tales and Traditional Tales are a part of many school and homeschool curriculums. Finding supporting materials can make these units more engaging for students and provide alternate learning strategies for learners.

Aesop's Fables

Aesop's Fables

Aesop's Fables UMASS Art Project Stories and Art Work

Great Books Online

World of Tales



African Folk Tales

African Folk Tales

Kids Zone

San Diego County Office of Education

Studying Africa through the Humanities

World of Tales

Zulu Folk Tales




Anderson Fairy Tales

Anderson Fairy Tales

Anderson Page



Celtic Tales

Celtic Fairy Tales Apples4theTeacher






Chinese Tales

Chinese Traditional Tales Apples4theTeacher






Fractured Fairytales

Library List of Titles

Scholastic Article on Using the The True Story of the Three Little Pigs






Grimm's Tales

Grimm Fairy Tales

Family Management

National Geographic

Translations of German Grimm Tales

World of Tales




Multiple Offerings

British Council Stories and Activities

Busy Teacher

Childrenstory

Coloring Pages

DLTK Fairytales, Aesop Fables Stories, Coloring Sheets, Crafts

Enchanted Learning Books to Print

Family Fun Mad Libs Fairy Tale

IvyJoy Fables and Fairy Tales

Whootie's Stories to Grow By Stories From Around the World

World of Tales Divided by Continent




Native American

American Folklore

Native American Legends

Native American Lore

World of Tales




Scottish Tales

Scottish Tales



Teaching Ideas

Fairy Tale PowerPoints

Fairy Tale Multi-Grade Unit

Fairytale Unit

Folk or Fairytale Slide Show

Teachingheart

Teachernet

Web Quest

Writing a Fairytale

Writing Slide Show

















Picture Credits:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jkransen/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jkransen/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Speaker's Theater

Speaker’s Theater like Reader’s Theater focuses on helping children develop reading fluency. However, Speaker’s Theater focuses most often on independent public speaking skills. Students are generally encouraged to choose a piece to read aloud to the class and assessed on fluency and presentation skills. Many teachers use this as a time to encourage exposure to poetry that can often be tough to fit into full curriculum schedules. Homeschooling parents can also use this format to encourage children to practice public speaking skills.

Unlike traditional recitation exercises, children are not required to memorize a poem. Many classrooms us a music stand as a podium to allow children to have a book or paper to read from. This allows them freedom from holding a book during the presentation. This often leads to presentations that are more creative and prevents children from hiding behind the book during the presentation.

Children should be encouraged to choose their own pieces and rehearse them prior to presentation. Setting up a schedule that gives children predictable expectations of when they will be reading, decreases anxiety and increases personal responsibility for preparing their performance. Homeschooling parents can determine how often this activity will occur. Most classrooms find that for every child to perform spreading children out over a weekly or biweekly schedule works best. Finding time to truly listen, evaluate, and provide useful feedback to each student requires time. It is better to spread out assignments than not to be able to provide each child with a meaningful activity.



Having poetry books in the classroom helps encourage children to engage in the activity. Homeschooling parents and teachers can get assistance from librarians in finding engaging material for children to read and present. The more the children enjoy the poems, the more they will be willing to practice and perform. In some schools, this tradition begins in Kindergarten and continues through elementary school. So many children have a long tradition with the activity. If it is something new being introduced, take the time to engage children with the process.



Rubrics:

Rubrics are often used with this activity to give children feedback on their performance. I was not able to find online versions, but I will add the Reader’s Theater Rubrics I posted in an earlier blog as they are very similar to Speaker’s Theater Rubrics I have used in the past. Read more...


Holt, Rinehart, and Winston

Humbolt

Learning Organizers

PBS





Picture Credits kittenpuff1 morguefile.com tinah morguefile.com

Reader's Theater

Plays have long been popular in the elementary classroom. Reader's theater has developed as a means to adapt popular literature to scripts. Children can be introduced to theater as casual read throughs or more formal plays depending on the time, talent, interests, and goals of the lesson. The ultimate goal is to improve fluency and give children confidence.

I'm working on finding resources for homeschooling groups and teachers who want to introduce reader's theater to their students.

Definitions of Reader's Theater :

Mr. Roth's Reader's Theater

Reading a-z

Reading Rocket






Scripts for Reader's Theater :

Adapting a Script

Busy Teacher's Scripts

Mr. Roth's Reader's Theater Script Collection

Have Fun Teaching Several Scripts

Reader's Theater K-3

Very Hungry Caterpillar

Whootie Owl's Reader's Theater Scripts



Rubrics:

Holt, Rinehart, and Winston

Humbolt

Learning Organizers

PBS

Self-Assessment

Picture Credits gemsling flickr.com

Literacy Improvement Using Extended Family

Some relatives more than others are willing to be involved with children’s education in a productive manner when they are given a direction or specific method to “plug in” to help. When a specific path is provided it can provide less friction and positive outcomes.

One area literacy experts are still pushing is encouraging parents not to abandon is reading aloud to children when children have mastered decoding. While children should be increasing the amount of independent reading they do, it is important that children still be exposed to books at higher comprehension levels and are still hearing models of decoding. Reading aloud provides both activities.

It is also important to vary the materials children have access to in order to insure that they are developing reading comprehension skills in all genres of fiction and non-fiction literature. As adults we tend to have our own preferences and these may or may not influence our child’s choices. However, introducing them to people who do read and enjoy genres that are different than what we are naturally drawn to can help children learn to enjoy different types of literature.

One book I would strongly suggest parents read is Jim Trelease's The Read-Aloud Handbook. This give parents great strategies and specific resources on continuing the read aloud process. It also can be useful in helping engage extended family in choosing books to share with your child.


Not all relatives are going to get on board but many will if you can make the commitment simple and easy to handle. Even for distant relatives there are many technologies available that allow them to share a book with a child with or without a visual.

Also consider answers to those challenging what to get the child for birthday and Christmas questions. Some relatives truly do not know how to approach shopping for a child. Consider some easy literary options. Magazines are easy for most adults to purchase subscriptions for and many age with the child. You will need to tell the person when the child is ready for the next level but this can be a great learning opportunity for your child and a simple and often not overly expensive way for a relative to remember your child’s special dates. You can click this link to find some of the magazine links but there are many magazines for children that follow general and specific interests.

Help Your Child Get Ready for the Back to School Essay

In many schools some version of the Back to School essay is standard. It generally has something to do with what the child did during summer vacation. For some students the “essay” is merely a few sentences strung together to reintroduce the concepts of brainstorming and sentence structure. For others it is a more detailed assignment to provide a writing sample for the beginning of the year. What ever the level of expectations for the assignment, parents can help children prepare in a simple, easy, and relaxing manner before returning to school.

Before panic emerges we will not be discussing essay writing or practice essays in this blog. That is counter productive and tends to just make kids frustrated and bored with the whole writing process before they even get to school.

Instead I am going to talk about ways to activate prior knowledge. One of the challenges as teachers when we use this topic is while many children have had active summers, when presented with a topic about summer say they did nothing. So one of the first steps in helping your child prepare is to talk about what your child enjoyed this summer. It should a casual conversation, not a quiz. Try to generate some ideas and stories about the things you did as a family, adventures at camp, outings with friends, or trips to see family. These are things you want to be fresh in your child’s mind.

Take out some family photographs from the summer. Pictures are a great way to trigger memories and get children talking. They can also be a wonderful way to work on categorizing. Talk about the photographs as stories. Younger children may pick one photograph that they will write their sentence on. Older children may end up with three photographs that best tell the story of summer and these will be the three main ideas. Again you are not working on writing at all at this point just generating memories and helping to organize ideas into categories.

This may be a great time to make a summer scrapbook with your child organizing photographs and having your child help label them and putting descriptions about what happened where to help all of you remember later. You can transcribe what the child says. The focus at this point is oral generation of stories. If the child wants to write by all means encourage it. However, the key is generating ideas and stories, not forcing the writing process. The more able your child gets at generating stories orally, the easier it gets to work with moving that towards the physical act of writing. If you can improve the rehearsal process, you can have a wonderful impact on the actual writing that occurs.

Even if the child’s teacher decides not to use this assignment this year, you have helped your child organize summer memories and taught valuable strategies for brainstorming and prewriting for future endeavors. The more you rehearse organizational strategies the more natural they become.