Fantastic Fairy Tales

We just finished up our 3 week fairy tale unit and I'm so excited to share what we've been up to.  This unit is *probably* my favorite of the year, and this year was the best yet!  We kicked off the unit by decorating the room with this cute little bulletin display:

You can click on the picture above to download the castle template I used.  I just printed on gray construction paper, and gave the kids scrapbook paper to make the flags :)

The first week we read several different versions of "The Three Little Pigs".  After reading the traditional version, I told the kids that they were going to get to be reporters, and get the scoop on the crime!  I gave each child a specific role to report on (what happened, where it happened, why is happened, what the wolf looked like, and a photographer to take "pictures" of the crime scene).  They got into groups with other children sharing their same role to share ideas and work on their report.  Each child then contributed one section to a group newspaper:

Sev

The next day we read "The True Story of the Three Little Pigs".  I told the little ones that any good reporter gets BOTH sides of the story, and that they would need to interview the wolf!  We did some "mock interviews" where the kids pretended to answer questions from the Wolf's perspective, and then they worked on answering these questions at their seats:  

Click on the picture to download the worksheet!

Next comes my favorite part of the unit!  Using the Toontastic app on the school iPads (that my fabulous principal was able to score for us this year), the kids were able to animate the interview!  We uploaded the videos to "ToonTube" to share with our families.  Click below to see one of their cute videos!:

We incorporated some of our fairy tale fun into out Literacy Centers too!  Below are a few of the activities from my Fantastic Fairy Tales (Differentiated Literacy Centers) pack:

 Magic Mirror Words: The kiddos LOVED this one! I told them an evil queen had put a curse on these words and now they were backwards!  To read them they had to use the magic mirror.  One little sweetie's comment was, "Mrs. Hagaman, I could get used to this center!)

Mad Hatter's Wacky Words: this one is a fun CVCe nonsense word game that is played like Go Fish.

Knight & Night: a write the room homonym activity!

Our last big project was our Fairy Tale lapbooks.  We worked on these throughout the unit as we read and learned about different fairy tales.  We started by created a class anchor chart defining the genre, and then the kids made their own mini anchor charts on the front of their lapbooks:

The inside of our lapbooks included some cute math connections, like this fun graphing activity "Who is the Most Wicked of them All?"

We are putting the finishing touches on our lapbooks, but it should be available to purchase in my TpT store by the end of the week!

I *think* that's just about it!  I hope you are all getting ready for a "Happy Ever After" to the 2012-2013 school year!