Last time I posted about a lesson plan in the classroom, some of you asked for some more!
I absolutely love teaching but my favorite thing is to have “theme days”. Nothing makes me more excited than when a certain theme can fit into all the subjects and bring learning to life in a new way for the kids.
One of my favorite things to do is to use picture books to bring learning alive. My class this year is very, very social and talkative. But when I pull out a picture book, they can sit still and listen for decently long time (like, 10 minutes, let’s be honest here- but I’ll take 10 minutes!).
Several months ago we had a small unit on fairy tales and folk tales. Unfortunately, I was terrible at taking pictures, but hopefully my wordy description will be sufficient for this blog post!
First, I introduced what a fairy/folk tale was and then asked the students to recount any fairy or folk tales they knew of.
In the back of the classroom, I displayed 8-9 versions of the same folk tale. The kids caught on right away that all of the stories were very similar. For this lesson, I went with the story of The Princess and the Pea. I told the kids that we were going to read ALL NINE of the stories in one day, but instead of just sitting and reading them in one sitting, I split it up all throughout the day. I also asked different guest readers to come in and pick a book to read to the students. My kids LOVED this. I asked our principal, our preschool director, our librarian, one students Mom, their kindergarten teacher from last year, our student intern, etc. If I had planned a little more in advance, I would have asked a few parents to come in throughout the day to read!
As we read each story, we then talked about different parts of the story:
- what was similar or difference about each story?
- who were the characters?
- what happened in the plot?
- what was the setting of the story?
- what was the moral of the story?
- what was your favorite part of the story?
- what was your favorite version of the story?
There were no worksheets or writing involved, but the way that the kids were able to follow along, finding similarities and differences, and state the plot points was incredible and so fun to see!
There are even more lessons that could be drawn from reading many versions of the same story, such as spending time making up or writing our own version of the story and having students read the story to themselves or to one another.
Just for fun, here are the versions of the Princess and the Pea that we read:
The Very Smart Pea and the Princess to Be by Mini Grey
The Princess and the Pea by Harriet Ziefert
The Princess and the Pizza by Mary Jane Auch
La Princesa and the Pea
Princess and the Peas
The Penguin and the Pea
Princess Pigtoria and the Pea by Pamela Duncan Edwards
Each of these books had something different and many things similar. Some of the endings were so surprising we were all laughing out loud! Some of the stories taught different lessons, and some were longer than others. After one or two books the students were SO excited to hear from their next guest reader! They all loved seeing how the story would end and how in the world the princess got up on top of the mattresses.
Another thing I love about this lesson is that it is versatile for both in the classroom and a homeschool setting! In a homeschool setting, you could read one or two books a day for a week- or get together with some other homeschool friends and each read a version out loud! And, there are so many other stories out there that have multiple versions that could also be applied to this lesson.