This week we spent our phonics and whole group reading blocks on the magic of Cinderella. The girls loved it, the boys put up with it (unfortunately my library transfer request for Cinder Fella didn't come in). I promised them that I would make it up to them by dedicating the last week of school to a true modern day fairy tale...Shrek. This did the trick.
As usual, we began our week with a four square organizer with the major story elements that we are studying - character, setting, problem and solution. This time we broke the character column into two sections, good characters and evil characters. This really only became a problem when deciding where to put Cinderella's father, since in every version we read he was mentioned but never elaborated on. We began with an original version, Cinderella by Kinuko Craft. Some of the wording was a bit difficult and since I teach an ESOL class I had to explain a bit of vocabulary, but overall they enjoyed the story and the beautiful illustrations.
For writing this week, I created a "How To" writing activity about how to get Cinder_____(enter student's first name) to the ball. We first reviewed the sequence of events that occurred after Cinderella met her fairy godmother who then helped her transform ordinary objects into magical ones. From there we had a mini-lesson review on how-to writing, which we have done a bit of this year. I modeled using some elements that were true to the story, and some that I changed. I then set the kids free to brainstorm their own objects to transform into magical elements. We had pizzas, crayons, and dogs that were turned into various objects to help CinderCarlos (ex.) to the ball. Funny how many students wound up with a batmobile like finale. Here are the writing pages that I created for this activity.
We worked on the writing all week and it came out really great. We didn't have much time to create an art activity to go with it, so we created a Reward Poster for our missing shoes to go along with the unit. The version I created is here.
I did create a template for creating our own carriage which I ran out of time to use, but I am including it here.
We continued reading various versions of the story throughout the week. Not as diverse as I had hoped, but our school library was a bit limited. I am hoping my wish list materials will be here in time for next year's unit. We worked on our writing daily, and I purchased a great unit from First Grade Fabulous Fish. I purchased the unit on Teachers Pay Teachers at:
We wrote about what we would wish for from our Fairy Godmothers and also used her ABC order to practice our alphabet skills. The kids loved the colorful vocabulary cards as well. I used them in my classroom writing center. I also purchased her entire Fairy Tale unit as well at:
which was WONDERFUL. Great activities for literacy stations and especially templates for the Writing center. Here is our version of her Fairy Godmother writing.
Finally, after a busy, action packed well in Cinderella-land, we wrapped up with our hallway display.
Not quite as fancy as our Jack and the Beanstalk unit, but still not so bad. :) Next week, on to the Three Little Pigs!
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