Introduction
Who doesn’t love fairy tales with their dramatic plots, evil characters and good ones, fantastical settings with magical happenings and, of course, the predictable happy ending! Young, and not so young children cheer for the good guys and boo the bad, sit wide-eyed as they wait for the next amazing event, and breathe a sigh of relief as the ultimate “good over evil” prevails.
The second-grade literacy curriculum in New Haven Public Schools includes a unit titled Writing Adaptations of Fairy Tales and Folk Tales. Throughout this unit, the students focus on the essential questions: Why is it important to understand what, why, and how a character does things? What elements need to be present in a variation of a classic tale? How do writers create their own versions of a fairy tale? This curriculum unit goes beyond my district’s approach to teaching folk tales and fairy tales by introducing the medium of film as an enriching component. The current Adaptations unit has a long list of student-learning points, including a general goal of “using the steps of the writing process” to a specific goal of, “understanding the structure of a fairy tale,” which includes the character experiencing wishes, magic, and living happily ever after. This unit expands and enriches my primary students’ understanding of these components of fairy tales through film adaptations.
As a primary-level teacher in a self-contained classroom at Edgewood Magnet School in New Haven, I find the neighborhood/magnet setting a rewarding environment, with students coming to school each day from a variety of home circumstances and with differences in academic levels. Because of these variables, the children have differing levels of background knowledge and life experiences. The classroom is a mixture of varied ethnicities, economic strata and social and emotional strengths and weaknesses. Edgewood provides an S.T.E.A.M. curriculum, an educational approach that uses Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts, and Mathematics as access points for guiding student inquiry, dialogue and critical thinking. This literacy unit supports the theme of our school, providing learning and experiences through the Arts.
Throughout the school year, the second-grade curriculum focuses on two Common Core State Standards: Ask and answer such questions as who, what, where, when, why and how and demonstrate understanding of key details; and, recounting (or retelling) stories, including fables and folktales and determine their central message, lesson or moral. With this direct connection between these standards and the approach of learning fairy tales, I anticipate that the students will be engaged and excited as they learn about characters on the page and the screen. Most of my students have seen the recent Disney adaptations of stories from around the world, meaning often the literature or written story comes after the viewing. We will have the opportunity to discuss what distinguishes literature from film, what they have in common and how adaptations differ from an original story which will support the two stated standards, among others in the New Haven Public School literacy curriculum.
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