Fairy Tales of Three: Literature and STEM Activities for the Primary Classroom

Fairy Tales of Three Week may be one of my favorite weeks ever in teaching!  Our week was full of excitement from digging into some great literature, to challenging STEM activities and fun crafts.  We chose to use two versions of each of the fairy tales The Three Billy Goats Gruff, The Three Little Pigs, and Goldilocks and the Three Bears.  

We focused on retell of events, as well as story structure when it came to tying fairy tales to our standards.  We also did lots of comparing and contrasting; I feel like we covered it all! ;)  On day one, we introduced fairy tales read the original version of Three Billy Goats Gruff.  We made a cute little troll craft which is on down in the post, too.

We even made theses fun retell bracelets from Dr. Jean.  These were amazing!  You HAVE to check these out and try them.  So easy and effective!

This printable is great if you want your students to record the order of events from the story in addition to the bracelet.

On day two, we read The Three Billy Goats Fluff!  ADORABLE book!  We used our bracelets from the day before to retell the events from this story and then we compared and contrasted the two versions.  Afterwards, we made these goat crafts.  I am not going to lie-these might have tested our patience but it was kindergarten.  They did turn out really cute, though.  Just wanted to throw that out there! ;)

For each pair of stories, we tied and STEM activity to it.  We got this idea from A Spoonful of Learning.  You just take construction paper and let students construct a bridge.  

I made some retell puppets and added them to my fairy tales unit so you can have your students play and retell the events from the story.  They will LOVE this!

We focused the most on The Three Little Pigs, because there is just so much you can do with it!  We narrowed it down to these three versions.  We started out by reading the original story.

Again, we made retell bracelets.  We had students all week begging to retell the story again!  It was that amazing to them!  These were a great quick assessment for report cards, too!  

We brought in these fun stuffed animals to use for retell.  We found these at Ikea.

We tied in art with pig and wolf crafts.  They were super simple and easy to make.  

For our STEM activity, we read Huff and Puff by Claudia Rueda.  It's a really cute book where the kids have to try to blow the pigs' houses down.  We then gave them the challenge of building a Pig's Dream House.  We showed them the types of materials the pigs used. 

We then had them design the dream house on a geoboard.

The following day, they built houses with marshmallows and toothpicks.  I told them it had to withstand the wolf trying to blow it down.

I dressed a hairdryer up like the Big Bad Wolf and tried to blow their houses down.  The kids were hilarious!  We got this idea from Sewing School.

Finally, we read these two versions of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.  They were super cute as you can see!  We were out that day, so we didn't get pics.  But they did retell, compare and contrast, and made a cute Goldilocks craft.

You can find my Fairy Tales of 3 Unit below with everything you need for the unit!  

My co-teacher Holly made a SMART board lesson to go with it.  You can check it out below, too!  Her lessons are really great and she has just started up her store, so please check it out!  They are great for keeping me on track and are very engaging for students.

Thank you so much for reading today!  I know you are busy, but I hope you love fairy tales as much as we do and can incorporate them into your classroom, too!