Cinderella without castles, coaches, or ball gowns? Students use versions of Cinderella to explore how the setting of a story--time, place, and culture--affects the characters and plot.

Students discuss and compare differing versions of Little Red Riding Hood and other tales about wolves in cumulative read-aloud sessions and text set explorations.

What do cowboy hats have to do with fairy tales? Two traditional fairy tales and their Texas-based counterparts set the stage for five different ways to respond to text.

Students examine three examples of revisionist fairy tales in which female characters act in empowered roles rather than behaving helpless and submissive.

Fairy Tales offer a common theme for early learners.  Students are able to follow along with the story and characters and what is happening.  Help students identify the main parts of a story (characters, setting, theme, problem, events, solution) in stories that they read.  Then have students create their own fairy tale story.Materials: Fairy Tale TemplateBook(s): The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by Jon Scieszka, The Stinky Cheese Man by Jon Scieszka, The Paperbag Princess by Robert N. Munsch, Once Upon a Cool Motorcycle Dude by Kevin O'MalleyLesson Plan:1. After reading familiar fairy tales and storie with students, have them identify characters, setting, theme, problem, events, and solution.  2. Share some "other" fairy tale stories from the books suggested above.  3. Let students brainstorm and come up with ideas they would like to use for their own fairy tale stories.  Have them use the Fairy Tale Template to help them organize their storyies and share ideas with others.4. You can have students write with partners or on their own to create their stories.  Allow them time to make an illustration as well.  Display their stories and allow for time to share their stories outloud with others.

Stories and poems that have a familiar structure can create a supportive context for learning about the writing process, building students' background knowledge, and scaffolding their creation of original stories. In this lesson for students in second or late first grade, teachers help students explore the concepts of beginning, middle, and ending by reading a variety of stories and charting the events on storyboards. As they retell the stories, students are encouraged to make use of sequencing words (first, so, then, next, after that, finally). A read-aloud of Once Upon a Golden Apple by Jean Little and Maggie De Vries introduces a discussion of the choices made by an author in constructing a plot. Starting with prewriting questions and a storyboard, students construct original stories, progressing from shared writing to guided writing; independent writing is also encouraged.

Folk tales and fairy tales are of interest to and part of the language arts curriculum for young learners. This lesson supports the study of this genre and the study of irregular patterns and letter-sound relationships related to decoding and spelling. After reading the folk tale Jack and the Beanstalk, students discuss the word giant and its beginning sound. Students then create their own lists of words that begin with the same sound. Then, students are introduced to words with the soft g sound and create a new list of words with this beginning sound. As a culminating activity, students work individually or in groups to categorize animal names into groups according to their beginning g sound.