I teach language arts for seventh and eighth grades at a preK - grade 8 magnet school in New Haven. Many of the students in our grade band are below grade-level in reading and writing. Scores show this situation will likely continue for several years as students continue to rebound from educational disruptions relating to the pandemic. Many of our students are multilingual learners, and some are identified with learning differences. Many students are still building stamina for reading lengthy texts. Using myths and fairy tales, this project outlines an anchor unit for the beginning of the year to introduce core strategies and literary elements that students will use to unpack texts throughout the school year.
Having come to teaching after a career as a professional writer, including publishing award-winning children’s books, I bring a deep understanding of how we use the power of narrative to organize, analyze, and connect information. The students in my classes already encounter a daily deluge of texts, delivered in a variety of traditional and digital formats, created for a multitude of audiences and purposes. To participate in this exchange of ideas now and in the future, they must develop a facility for evaluating and interpreting texts, purposefully seeking out texts, and creating texts themselves. One strategy I can offer them as a teacher is to cultivate a deep understanding of the power of story. Our brains are hardwired to respond to narrative stories as a way to organize, connect, and analyze information and as a way to influence and exchange information with others. If students understand how stories work, they will be better prepared to think critically about the stream of information they encounter and become more effective communicators themselves.
By offering a series of short texts, this unit will welcome students back to school with high-interest stories that can be read quickly and analyzed efficiently. Students will explore four core elements of fiction—character, setting, plot, and theme. Using myths, fables, and fairy tales will make it possible for students to analyze the impact of these elements on a complete story and to easily compare multiple texts. This repetition will emphasize how these building blocks are common across narrative forms and will promote student confidence as we move on to analyze these elements in longer, more complex texts. In addition, this unit will bring students together as a learning community with a shared experience that can be referred back to throughout the year. As we add more concepts throughout the year, we can easily revisit these short texts that students know well, so they can first apply new ideas to familiar texts.
To reflect the diversity of student backgrounds in these classes, the texts for this unit will offer stories from a variety of cultures, including tales from Central and South America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. Classroom conversations will explore the values and perspectives reflected in the tales. This unit will also include contemporary short stories that relate to myths and fairy tales—perhaps through allusion, format, or use of magic. Making links between older and contemporary forms of literature will increase the relevance of this unit to students’ lives. Students may be able to draw on the enjoyment of classic tales from when they were younger to find more literature to enjoy today. Connecting contemporary literature to a broader framework also shows students how universal the narrative lens is, and that we can learn from studying the craft and purpose of almost any story.
