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Fairy
Tales - a Multi-disciplinary Approach
I first developed this unit on fairies when I worked with students who
were reluctant to read and write. While this is not the case with the
gifted/talented third grade students I now teach at Hunter College Elementary
School, the writing of my previous students lacked imagination. I decided
to tackle this issue by immersing the students in fantasy. What better
way to do this than to read fairy tales from different cultures and by
various writers?
In trying to find as many fairy tales as possible that might appeal
to the students, I found that some of the great writers of literature
had written fairy tales: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oscar Wilde, Louisa May
Alcott, E.E. Cummings, and more. These fairy tales were wonderful to read
and to discuss with the students in the class. We discussed the characteristics
of a fairy tale before writing our own fairy tales.
We worked on the main characters of our stories and in doing so we created
the main characters not only in words, but in flowers - like in Cicely
Mary Barker's Flower Fairy books. The students used silk flowers and pipe
cleaners to make the fairies.
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