The Gingerbread Boy is a popular folktale, and makes a great classroom theme at this time of year. In the story, a Gingerbread Boy (or a Gingerbread Man) is baked and runs away. As he is running off, he meets various animals or people, all of whom try to catch… Continue reading
“Toads and Diamonds” is another story from Charles Perrault. Picture books of the story are hard to find, though DK’s A First Book of Fairy Tales includes it. Read the story aloud and then have students retell the tale. For the class retelling, we like to divide the story into… Continue reading
“The Twelve Dancing Princesses” is a story collected by the Brothers Grimm. Andrew Lang also collected a French version of this story in his Red Fairy Book, and you can read it here. Marianna Mayer has done a beautiful picture book of The Twelve Dancing Princesses and Rachel Isadora has… Continue reading
Mother Goose rhymes are the ideal first experience of poetry for young children. One Mother Goose rhyme that many young kids will not have heard already — and which actually has sophisticated enough vocabulary for elementary kids as well — is The House that Jack Built: This is the house… Continue reading
“The Princess on the Glass Hill“ is one of the more obscure fairy tales, but the image of the suitors trying to get up the glass hill to the princess is familiar to most of us. Since our state frameworks mandate the use of of folk and fairy tales up… Continue reading
The Elves and the Shoemaker is a tale from the Brothers Grimm. In it, a poor shoemaker has only enough leather for one pair of shoes. He cuts the shoes out and leaves them ready to make in the morning. In the morning when he gets up, he finds (usually) two… Continue reading
“Stone Soup” is a fun story to read and to act out, and it presents a classic message. In the story, three soldiers traveling through a town ask for food, but in vain. The villagers feel too poor to share, and they decide together to hide their food and refuse… Continue reading
Theodor Seuss Geisel was a children’s author and illustrator whose special style makes a great classroom theme! His inspirational books can provide a good starting point for upper grades, and little kids love his goofy easy reading books. It’s easy to set up a Seuss classroom, because there are plenty… Continue reading
Mt. St. Helens erupted on May 18, 1980. I was living in Northern California at the time, and we had ash falling on us from the sky. For so many of us, volcanoes are something we think of as having happened long ago and far away — the eruption of… Continue reading
The story of Paul Bunyan is an American folktale. It may be more proper to say that the stories of Paul Bunyan are American folktales, because there are quite a few of them, sometimes gathered together into a single long story, but sometimes not. Paul Bunyan is a folk hero among… Continue reading
