Fairytale Unit Study

We kicked off our 2022-2023 homeschool year with a fairytale unit. The purpose of this unit was to make sure we explored the elements of fiction. Story elements are part of Common Core for K5, and since we hadn’t explicitly learned those, I decided this was a great opportunity. Although South Carolina homeschoolers aren’t required to follow standards, I do look over the Common Core standards each year. My hope is that staying relatively close to the standards would help ease the transition for my kids if we ever needed to utilize public school.

This year, we have a first grader (6) a preschooler (4) and a 2 year old. Our homeschooling approach is “family style”. We primarily learn through unit studies I’ve created. I also sprinkle Charlotte Mason elements into our morning gathering time. As we are still working on learning to read and write legibly, we are using separate curriculums for reading and handwriting. We will always use a math curriculum, since math is a lot harder to integrate into units in a cohesive and thorough way. (Although some people do it really beautifully!)

In This Unit

Our focus included story elements, “Wh” questions, and different points of view. In order to cover those topics, we read many different fairytale versions from around the world. Europe is our area of focus in geography this term, so we found famous castles and their countries on a map. We wrote our own versions of the fairytales we read, and created art to accompany them. This idea came from the Jot it Down curriculum from Julie Bogart, which I love. We also learned about what life was like in a castle for the people who lived and worked there.

During our fairytale unit, we focused on the stories of Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, and Hansel & Gretel for literature. We explored characters, settings, and plots of the stories and compared and contrasted those things across different versions of the tales. Then, we integrated this with geography by locating the countries from each story on a map.

Cinderella Week

This week, we read “Cinderella”, “Seriously, Cinderella was SO Annoying”, “Cendrillon”, “Smoky Mountain Rose”, “Yeh Shen”, and “Adelita”. After reading, we named the characters, described the settings, and talked about the differences in the plots of all the stories. Next, each of the older kids took turns answering Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How, about the stories. My goal is to take a field trip related to our content once a week. Sometimes it’s a real stretch, so this week we visited Hampton Plantation. It was the closest thing I could come up with that was within driving distance and also allowed us to practice Covid safety. Disney’s Cinderella was the “Movie Monday” pick this week. We made Cinderella stick puppets to retell the story, and wrapped up the week by creating a Cinderella collage dress.

Little Red Riding Hood Week

During our Little Red Riding Hood Week, we studied wolves to go along with the different versions of the story we read (“Red Riding Hood”, “Little Red Riding Hood Was Rotten”, “Lon Po Po”, “Pretty Salma”, and “Petite Rouge”) and we visited Charlestowne Landing to see some red wolves. We attempted to use pointillism to create some unique art to go along with our own versions of the story, and watched Into the Woods for Movie Monday.

Hansel and Gretel Week

This week, we read stories from the book “Hansel and Gretel Stories around the World”, and “Trust Me, Hansel and Gretel are SWEET”. We designed our own versions of the witch’s house using mini wooden gingerbread houses and candy stickers. Our field trip this week was to get our long awaited Covid vaccines! We watched Robin Hood this week for movie Monday.

Final Fairytale Unit Study Week

We assembled our fairytale books as part of our Jot it Down Curriculum. The kids enjoyed showing dad their artwork and listening to him read the stories they dictated. We explored the books “Eyewitness Castle”, “A Year in a Castle”, and “The Knight and the Dragon”, and completed Knights and Castles sticker books. Sticker books are one of my favorite resources for unit studies because the kids get to interact with the material they are learning. They also enjoy putting the completed books into their book boxes, where they can review them later. We visited Fort Moultrie for this week’s field trip, and enjoyed exploring the fort’s defenses. We spent lots of time building with castle blocks, and worked with cardboard boxes to build a big castle together. On Movie Monday, we watched The Sword in the Stone.

Our castle and fairytale unit was such a fun way to kick off our school year. Next week, I’m going to share another fun unit study on oceans!

Get my FREE tip sheet for teaching a fairytale unit here. It has links to all the books we used, some fun extras, field trip ideas, and a list of shows we watched to accompany our unit.