Description
Fairy Tales in the Classroom: Teaching Students to Write Stories with Meaning through Traditional Tales by children's author Veronica Martenova Charles provides primary level teachers with an approach to classroom storytelling orally, pictorially and in written forms. The author draws on her Czech heritage by selecting key fairy tales and archetypes from the European tradition. She looks at the writings of Bettelheim, Favat, Rodari, Jung and Vladimir Propp and devised an approach for reaching young children through stories. The author field-tested her system with 700 students in 23 classrooms in 15 schools. Many of the schools were in the Toronto region and some were located in northern Ontario. She also tested her system in an Ojibwe community school. The universal symbols and lesson approach she created resulted in students' art and stories, many of which are reproduced in this volume. The book contains reproducible blackline masters of the symbols and detailed lesson plans for eliciting student responses. The author found that primary level students are most receptive to the magic of fairy tales and her method worked well by stimulating their imagination and creativity in their personal stories.