My students will be ready to try their hand at writing their own fairy tales after being immersed in this genre for many weeks. The chart depicting the elements of each fairy tale read will be a valuable resource as they begin to plan their stories. I will remind them that they are to follow narrative format and write a story with a beginning, middle and end.
A very simple process for writing a traditional tale will be to begin with a graphic organizer with space to write the names of two characters, a setting and a problem. They will then go on to ‘add meat to the bones’ and tell their story using elaborative detail to describe the characters, the setting and the events that lead up to the problem as well as the solution. I will remind them to include a touch of magic in their tales.
A second type of writing lesson would be to have students write fractured fairy tales. Two good resources for this are Justin McCory Martin’s
12 Fabulous Funny Fairy Tale Plays
and J. M. Wolf’s
Cinderella Outgrows the Glass Slipper and Other Zany Fractured Fairy Tale Plays.
Wolf suggests that fractured fairy tales help young people view fairy tales from a different perspective, keeping the question of ‘what if’ in mind (p. 4). Students could work in pairs, taking notes on the elements of traditional fairy tales and then mixing the elements of these stories together. What if, for example Snow White meets the Big Bad Wolf? Through experimentation students could come up with some highly original tales to share with the class.
Again, since our emphasis in third grade is on writing narrative stories, the students will be asked to write their fractured fairy tales in narrative format, following the Empowering Writers diamond which includes: a dazzling beginning, a description of setting, creating suspense, a main event and an extended ending. Lesson Plan III will provide a more detailed description of this type of lesson.
