Little Minds at Work

KinderLiteracy Fairy Tale Unit Recap

Well hello there my sweet teacher friends and hello November! Yes, say it isn’t so…it’s really November!  Well I’m sure you noticed the absence of my peek at weeks and weekly recaps.  Well, I decided that although the weekly looks are great…I wanted to instead offer and entire unit’s recap!  I thought that this would help to make the bigger picture of an entire unit {4 weeks} be even better!  What unit will I be recapping with you today? Well, we just wrapped up our RETELL unit!  Now, before KinderLiteracy I would have totally told you that I taught the concept of retell to my kindergarten students and I would for sure say that “had it!”  However, after breaking KinderLiteracy down to skill based units and really thinking about what I want the kids to get from each unit I can now tell you that this year my kids DO know retell and DO have it down!

Not only did we focus on retell for these five weeks, but we also focused on fairy tales for four of those five!  The kiddos ate up the fairy tales and I can’t wait to recap that for you!  Our fairy tales for this unit {all included within KinderLiteracy} were The Three Pigs, The Three Bears, The Three Billy Goats, and The Little Red Hen!  We wrapped up the retell unit with a fairy tale show for our parents and I’ll explain that more below! Also, know that any/all material I show in this post is part of KinderLiteracy so if you own that bundle you also have all these goodies! Okay let’s get started!

The Three Pigs

For the majority of my close read lessons we focus on a theme each week and place that into our bubble chart!  However, for the fairy tale stories we created these story element posters!  Here is our poster for this week…

Our vocabulary words + vocabulary cards!  The best part of the vocabulary cards are adding in the actions for each week!  This week huffed was the prized winner for favorite!
Each week of KinderLiteracy you’re encouraged to bring in an alternate text for comparing and contrasting.  For the fairy tale weeks I chose alternate versions as the kiddos always enjoy hearing “another side of the story.”  This week I brought in The Three Little Cajun Pigs!  I LOVE this book!  I don’t do the author justice because he is just perfected the Cajun language, but I sure try!  You can listen to a version of it HERE.

A huge part of KinderLiteracy’s retell unit is using the retell cards along with the go, slow, stop signs for encouraging students to think about the beginning, middle, and end of the story!  Here is a look at the cards!

For this first week we worked as a class to sequence the cards in order using the signs! 

The students also had their chance to sequence the cards on their own during a quick end of the week assessment!  Below is a look at the assessment sheet under the hover cam.  I used this as a way to show the students where the go, slow, and stop signs would fall on their sheets!  

Each of the fairy tale weeks we also made retell sticks and retell craft!  Below you can see our Three Pigs retell sticks and our three pigs houses made out of milk cartons!

 

 


And acting out the story!  *Melts my heart!*

Each week we also did a quick craft!  Here are our little piggies! OINK!

And here is all of our hard work on display in the hallway! Love these little piggies!

The Three Bears

And it’s off to the next fairy tale!  We followed suit with the same activities throughout the four weeks of fairy tales so these activities will look similar!   I also have videos for each of the teacher days for this week!  You can view those videos in THIS post! Here is a look at our story elements poster!  You can see for this week we added setting! 

Here are our vocabulary words for The Three Bears!

With all the other fairy tale weeks I paired an alternate version!  For this version the students had to compare the endings and how Goldilocks reacted at the end of the story!


Here is a look at one of the blackline follow up sheets for the week!  Students were illustrating the setting from the story!

A look at the completed sequence of events performance task!

For the The Three Bears we made a retell craft that included a page in the book for each part of the story!  This craft did include a bit of prep, but the kiddos loved it!

I wanted to save each week’s poster and display them together to show all of the fairy tales we had learned! Here is The Three Pigs and The Three Bears!

The Three Billy Goats

And we’re off to the next fairy tale!  The kids always, always, always love the Three Billy Goats…I mean who can’t?  Here is a look at our story elements poster {minus the BME picture cards} we added those the following day.  You can see each week we added a new concept to discuss on the story elements posters!  As designed by KinderLiteracy …each story element is taught slowly to allow the kids to really grasp the concept before adding on a new skill the following week!

And the weekly vocabulary words and cards!

Essential questions are posted on the board each week for discussion!  Here are the two for this week!  I like one literacy skill-based essential question and one life-based essential question!  Both questions are mentioned and discussed throughout the week with the hope that the kiddos can clearly answer both by the end of the week!

KinderLiteracy includes a great way to assess kiddos each day post lesson and see how much they are taking from the lesson and allows you to see if they are able to apply it!  This is a quick vocabulary exit ticket!  The kiddos were illustrating valley and rushing!

Each week we continued with our retell cards!  Here is a look at this week’s!

Our retell craft for this week was easy, but oh so fun!  The kiddos also made their retell sticks!

And another poster added…

The Little Red Hen

The final week of our fairy take study was The Little Red Hen!  I had originally planned to just do three weeks, but the kiddos were having so much fun so we swapped Stellaluna for The Little Red Hen!

And our story elements poster for the week!

The weekly vocabulary words!

Our essential questions and the skill-based question was summative to our fairy study!  What actually makes a story a fairy tale?

And the retell practice kept on going!  True retell experts now! 🙂

For The Little Red Hen we once again made retell sticks to tell the story with!

We also made these ADORABLE hens from Jennifer at First Grade Blue Skies!

So stinkin’ cute!


Fairy Tale Performance
As a way to celebrate our study of fairy tales we help a fairy tale show for our parents!  I already had these masks, but there are some headbands included within KinderLiteracy!  We practiced and practiced until we were ready!

Each kiddo had a part in the performance and I think the parents loved it!  I was so teacher proud!


                         

After the performance we munched on cookies and punch!

                                

I had also had the kiddos save all of the fairy tale retell sticks and retell crafts in a large Ziploc baggie.  They were able to pull out the sticks and retell the stories for the parents!

Well, that is a wrap for fairy tales!  We are now off to our first real big start in nonfiction studies!  Wooohoo for KinderLiteracy unit 3!  Also, I mentioned above but all of the material that was presented is included within the units!  They really do stop the hunting around that used to occur each week at lesson planning!  It’s all in there for you! You can view more about KinderLiteracy HERE. Have a great week and talk soon!

Comments

  1. Thanks for ALWAYS sharing how it looks in your classroom. I am often inspired by your videos and pictures to teach like Tara! Congrats on making learning so meaningful and fantastically fun for your students.

    Reply

  3. I just bought your fairytale close reading bundle and it's great to have this post to complement it. We just finished The Three Little Pigs. We are starting The Little Red Hen today. Where can I get the sequencing cards? Thanks!

    Reply

  4. Hi Tara! I purchased your guided reading Mega Bundle and I LOVE it! I raved about it so much that I got our first grade team interested in your 1st grade one and they bought it. Thanks for all your hard work and great ideas. I cannot tell you how happy I am to have a full year's resource that was created by an actual teacher. A million thanks!

    Reply

  5. Tara I have the Kinder Literacy Bundle. I am doing the Fairy Tale Unit right now with my class. I don't see the characters for the stick puppets. Are those not part of the unit? I love the ones you show in the pictures- all on one page with cutting lines!

    Reply

  8. Hi Tara,
    Is there a list for your Kinderlitercy Pack? I am trying to decided if it is something I can get ready this summer. By the way…L.O.V.E. your guided reading bundle.

    Reply

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