ISM Spotlight – Fairy Tale Cottages

This year I am the luckiest teacher in the world. I get to teach at the best school ever – International School of Morocco, with some of the best, most creative, teachers ever. Each time I walk into someone else’s classroom, I get inspired and we just seem to spiral great teaching ideas off of each other. It’s a wonderful place to teach, and since we are all collaborating, it’s a wonderful place for our kids to learn – a teacher’s dream, right? I have tried and tried to convince the other teachers to create blogs of their own to spotlight and share some of their amazing ideas, but everyone is super busy. Instead, they have each agreed to let me spotlight some of their ideas right here on Raki’s Rad Resources. So, each Friday night, I will be posting an ISM Spotlight.

Our amazing Year 1/ Year 2 teacher, Courtney Nassar, recently finished a unit on Fairy Tales.  They studied a variety of Fairy Tales, including Pinnochio, Snow White, and Three Billy Goats Gruff.  For each story, Ms. Nassar had the students look at the location and cultures of the countries where these stories come from.  

With Pinnochio, the students learned about Italy.  The students learned about the Italian flag, the mountainous country.  Additionally, Ms. Nassar used this opportunity to teach students about different types of puppets, including marionettes, shadow puppets and traditional puppets.

With Snow White, the students learned about multiple countries, including Germany, France, Spain and Italy, because this story has multiple versions.   The students created questions about what they wanted to know about each country and Ms. Nassar guided the students through finding the answers to their questions.  Also, the students wrote the story from the point of view of the dwarf.

Ms. Nassar had the students compare and contrast all of the stories they read.  One of the similarities that the students found amongst all of the stories was that each story had a “cottage” in the background.  For their big project, the students created their own cottages out of recycled materials.  Then, they wrote a fairy tale that took place in their cottage.  Here are some of their projects:

   

               

                   

 

Stop by next week to see what else is going on at ISM.