With the popular explosion of Fairy Tales in Entertainment, students are becoming more familiar with classic fairy tales. All fairy tales and fables revolve around a moral or a lesson. Using these classic examples, a variety of story writing activities can be generated.
- Fractured Fairy Tales
A story that uses fairy tale characters, settings, or plot elements, and alters the story’s point of view or setting, to create a new and often humourous story. The original moral/lesson in the story may also be changed. - Fable
A story that uses morals to teach a lesson and often uses animals as characters.
Simple morals such as “Don’t Take Things From Strangers” in Snow White, to “Slow But Steady Wins the Race” in the Tortoise and the Hare, can inspire students to create stories which can be illustrated.
While working with a class last week, I gave students each a moral (ListofMorals) and asked them to generate a story from this moral. As most fables revolve around animals demonstrating human characteristics (personification), I asked them to use animals as characters. Their animals were to be well suited to the role like choosing a fox to depict a devious character. The problem in their story was generated from their moral so the moral “appearances often are deceiving” could have a character who trusts a “beautiful” character and/or mistrusts an “ugly” character.
The students were asked to use Inspirations ( Fableoutline) to organize their stories, generating ideas for characters, setting and attempts to solve problem. Students were then to draft their stories on Word and begin chunking the story on pages for future drawings. I suggested a minimum of 6 pages, therefore 6 drawings.
The teacher and I talked about the opportunity for these students to read their completed stories to younger students. This generated excitement within their class as now an audience was a reality. Story writing is more exciting when the audience is beyond their own class.