Fairy Tales

One of Nora’s favorite things to do is act out Fairy Tales.  I love to see how she has taken ownership of these simple stories after “playing them” over and over.  Lately we have been playing “The Princess and the Pea” a LOT.   Max plays the Prince, Nora – of course, is the Princess, and I get to narrate and be the Queen, although Nora often chimes in to help tell the details.  Oh – and Nora also has to be the one to hide the ‘pea.’

She is quite dramatic when she explains what a terrible sleep she had because of that lumpy pea.   Nora loves to play this story, and she certainly knows it and understands it; but she has not wanted to retell the story by herself yet.

 

Many years ago I bought this Frank Schaffer book that contains simple versions of Fairy Tales along with 6 pictures for each story.  I used them in lots of ways to retell stories.  I have shared a few of them on this blog, and I have received many, many requests for a copy of the entire book.  I have tried for the past couple of years to obtain permission from the publisher, but have not been able to contact the right people.  I wrote to the address in the book and got no reply.  Then I found out that Carson Dellosa had bought out Frank Schaffer products but when I contacted them they had no record of this book.

I make no profit from my blog – I don’t charge for anything that I share.  I am happy to help teachers develop materials that they can use to help children.  I am sharing the stories from this book but I am giving full credit to the author Sue Ryono.  Please do not use these images for personal gain – or on TPT or any other site that charges a fee.  If I find out that I am infringing rights I will remove them from my blog.

So today I gave Nora the pictures from the story “The Princess and the Pea” and asked her to put them in order.  It was fun hearing her talk about what was going on in each picture.

After she got them all in the right order she did a great job telling me the entire story without any prompting.  Then she wanted to take the pictures home to tell the story to Mommy and Daddy too!

Acting out stories is a wonderful way to help children with comprehension and developing new vocabulary.   I also see children making connections between stories and other things that they hear or experience.   Last week I baked cookies with my Grandchildren Owen, Anna and Lily.  They went home with a container of our cookies, but when their Dad asked to sample one, Anna asked, “Do you remember the Little Red Hen?”  Since he had not helped she wasn’t sure she wanted to share!

I think these pictures can also be a great resource to encourage children to retell stories.  I hope they are helpful for you!

In the original book these short stories are all in the back of the book, 4 stories on each page.  I enlarged and separated them so I could put each story under the matching sequencing pictures.  I never worried about telling a story exactly as this is written, but they are helpful if you are trying to remember details of some of the stories.

 

 

I hope you love using these as much as I have.  And if you can – take some time to act out stories too!  So much fun!

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