Grade: Elementary

#2633. Fairy Tale Lesson / Grade 4

Reading/Writing, level: Elementary
Posted Wed Jul 10 08:02:16 PDT 2002 by Melissa (mrsmreynolds@msn.com).
Saint Joseph School, Carteret, NJ, USA
Materials Required: Books, paper, coloring tools, pencils
Activity Time: About 7 Class Periods
Concepts Taught: Reading, writing, cooperative group work

This is the first year that I tried this, but the kids really got into it, and so did I. I selected cooperative groups and assigned each member to a task.
Illustrator - Illustrates the book
Editor - Proofreads and makes corrections as needed
Binder - Rewrites story, and binds book as well as pictures
Starter - Makes introduction, lays out characters and plot (responsible for 3 paragraphs)
Middle - Does the meat of the story (climax)
Ender - Wraps up conflict, gives moral what ever they decide to be the end

My requirements made for a small story, but I wanted to work on cooperation. My one tip is to make a story of your own, and show it off to them so they know exactly what you are looking for, and what it should look like. During this assignment, I have linked across several subjects: Vocabulary/Spelling (we learned castle words) Literature (we read fairy tales aloud, and in group, we also worked on the web with different stories and worksheets) English (we diagramed sentences from fairy tales) Social Studies (we learned about life in a castle) Science (we made constructions of castles using blocks) Math (we used construction paper cut outs to make castles, moat, flags - geometry based) I also made a power point presentation of all the vocabulary words so they could recognize words and match with a picture. The kids ranked this as one of their favorite projects of the school year. When we were all finished, we presented them to the class. I also used a rubric for the assessent.

Just a small note, if you are just starting to use power point, I do want to warn you that some presentations can take as much as three hours or more to put together. My one on castles took about 3 1/2 hours (because I was trying to get pictures for each elemenet).