Learning from fairy tales

[Editor’s Note: Progressiveteacher81 is a pseudonym for a second-year elementary school teacher in Manhattan.]

The day back from Christmas break, wondering what I should put on my 1st and 2nd graders’ tables as morning work, I decided, two minutes before arrival, on fairy tales. A few kids already seemed particularly interested in these stories and the whole class needed work discussing and writing plot. Immediately, it was a successful move. Students loved exploring the stories. I had fun reading them. Students also started to understand the elusive concept of summarizing and quickly began writing fairy tales of their own.

The project quickly evolved though into something much deeper. The art teacher and I had been looking for something to collaborate on and she immediately suggested puppets! We chose five stories with four characters for each table group to make puppets and write a puppet show for. To immerse the children in the stories, I began to read version after version of each tale. We would start with the traditional and whenever possible find a modern and changed retelling. We talked about adjectives: “big bad wolf” vs. “little pigs.” The kids debated whether everything “big” was bad or “little” good. We talked about setting. Where would you set a New York City Fairy Tale” “In an alley,” said one child. “Those are the scariest places.” We considered perspective: reading stories from the wolf’s point of view, debating whether one could ethically eat the Gingerbread boy. We noted that the good characters were often quite foolish. Why would you build a house of straw if you could build it of bricks? The more we read, the more we noticed that the female adult characters were almost always evil. Bella pointed out, “I’m not so sure about this but I noticed something a little funny. The women are usually mean. It’s not fair. I’m a girl and there are all the girls in the class. We aren’t evil and we won’t grow up to be mean.”

Then I started sprinkling in fairy tales from other cultures. Immediately, the kids were taken with the more positive, generous and subtle messages of Gerald McDermott’s Native American Trickster Tales. Then, after reading the Western story, “The Magic Fish,” where the fisherman’s wife asks for more and more until she loses everything, the kids revolted. “She shouldn’t have been so mean but she shouldn’t have lost everything,” said Ellie. “It’s not really fair that she gets so punished.”

“What’s this tale trying to teach you?” I asked the class. “Not to be greedy,” they responded. “Does it work?” I asked. “No,” Elias said confidently, “It tells you everything you shouldn’t do and you leave the story thinking about what you shouldn’t do instead of what you should. You’re more likely to do the bad thing this way.” Plus, they generally concurred: it leaves you with a bad, angry feeling.

In contrast, the class loved Gail Sakurai’s Peach Boy, a retelling of a Japanese story that teaches generosity through positive example. They immediately connected the two tales. “It’s just that in Peach Boy, you learn to be nice and generous because he’s so generous,” Shana shared. “And that is why,” I announced triumphantly, “when we’re making rules at the beginning of the year, I have you put them in the positive and I usually focus on what you should do — be kind, walk in the hallways, be quiet so your classmates can read.” I had been saying this all year but finally, they nodded, showing signs of comprehension.

After this moment, though still enjoying reading and hearing the Western tales, the class was increasingly critical of their punitive and violent nature. They rewrote fairy tales again and again during writing workshop — often substantially changing the message. In Elias’ “How Fishman got the Sun,” two characters about to battle each other ultimately decide to work together. Leora’s Little Pigs discuss with the wolf whether they should, in fact, be fighting at all.

Now, three months later, the puppets are nearly complete, save some finishing touches — a baseball cap for one little pig, a mouth for Goldilocks. The scripts have been written and sent home with instructions to read loudly and clearly. The performance date is set and invitations are going out.

But the children’s work goes beyond a puppet show. They have had the opportunity to learn and rewrite powerful Western European narratives: the heritage of the culture we live in. They have made them their own versions: adding mean landlords, better female roles, and often alternative endings — Little Red Riding Hood ends much like our school day with the principal characters sitting down to a snack. Further, the children seem to have internalized some sense that none of these stories have the kind of definitive truth that I took for granted as a child. As the children concluded in their version of Little Red Riding Hood: “The end. No. Not the end of the world. Just the end of this story.” They have claimed a right to revise.

 Print