Ways to Use Traditional Children's Stories in Class
The Three Little Pigs, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Hansel and Gretel and many others are a part of childhood. a lot of adults don't even know when they first heard them or learnt about them, they have just always been a part of your world.
These traditional stories are not only a fun part of childhood they are also important for development.It has been proven that children exposed to the same story many times have a distinct advantage over their peers who are not.
With this in mind, teachers can use these traditional tales to promote literacy in the classroom. So here are my favourite ways to include and reinforce these stories with your class.
Retell them
The retelling of stories is great for children. Start with a book then move onto just retelling the story. Children can join in with the parts they know and tell the general story to each other. This is a great way to also encourage kids to adapt stories into their own words
Act them out
Drama is always fun! Children will learn the parts of a story more quickly if they have acted them out and seen their friends do the same.
Create props
A way to include arts and crafts in your literacy lessons is to make and play with props from the stories. They children can create character props, scene backgrounds and objects from the story. It can be as simple as drawing them and sticking to lolly-sticks to use to act out the story.
Draw the story
This is especially fun if you use a large roll of paper (old wallpaper is great if you can't source anything appropriate). Lay the paper out on the floor and children work together retelling the story in drawings. This is best done in groups as the children talking to each other about their drawings allows for experimentation and more focus on retelling.
Discussion groups
Once the story is well known, it is fun to put the children into groups and give them a topic from the story to discuss, ideas for this could be:
- Why did the pigs choose different materials?
- Should Goldilocks have gone into the bears house?
- What would you do if you were lost in the woods?
Please have a look at my Traditional Fairy Tales Unit of Work.
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