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Transforming Fairy Tales
Lesson 3: Writing our Fairy Tales

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Lesson 1. Transforming

My students had no problem starting to write their own tales. Many selected familiar tales and changed the character or the setting. The three little pigs became the three little fish. Cinderella became a modern girl. Some students used this assignment to write more 'personal' tales.
For those students who may need additional inspiration, http://surlalunefairytales.com/index.html has 26 annotated fairy tales, including their histories.

I have often found that young students are very slow at word-processing. We were able to circumvent the biggest problem with using the computers; getting the words on the screen. We are fortunate that many classes have Alphasmarts, small word processing machines.This allowed students to write at home and then transfer the writing to the computer in school. I would also suggest that students with home computers could e-mail their writing to the teacher.
To see what other students didi with fairy tales, you can visit http://putnamvalleyschools.org/ft/02Elements.html

Lesson 5. Creating a character template

Lesson 2. What is a fairy tale?
What are the characteristics?

Students wrote on the Alphasmart. They were then able to connect the Alphasmart using a USB cable directly into the computer and transfer writing files. We use Macs, but these inexpensive machines are compatible with PC's as well.
(HINT: I found with some computers, it was necessary to unplug the mouse and then transfer files by plugging the Alphasmart directly into the computer. Cables can be plugged in the computer or the keyboard.)
TO TRANSFER: Open a word processing document (saved as student name/fairytale). Plug the Alphasmart into the computer and press "send".

Lesson 6. Transforming characters

Lesson 3. Writing our fairy tales
How can we transform a tale?

For students who needed some assistance getting started, I provided this writing guide which I adapted from another source.

Lesson 7. Finding backgrounds on the Internet.

Lesson 4. Editing our tales

Index

See our fairy tales

Lesson 8. Putting the pages together