Storytelling is always central to our learning in Autahi. Stories engage and entertain us. They also provide powerful ways to help us to understand ourselves, other people and the world around us. We also find that stories really get us talking: developing our children's oral language is key as it is the foundation for so much of their learning, not least writing.
Fairy tales are a rich source of learning for our children. These are traditional stories that most of them know pretty well from books, songs and also movies. Familiar stories also give everyone a common access point to the learning: we begin from a point where everyone knows something about the story and build from there. It is fascinating to explore the different versions of these tales, and also burrow into some of the themes and learning opportunities that they offer.
In this Blog, we'll share some of the learning that has been taking place in Autahi through fairy tales. Hopefully, they'll inspire some conversions at home about these stories. Watching the Disney Channel may never be the same again!
Oral Language
Here is the story of the Three Little Pigs, with an oral language and visual literacy focus. With all the words taken away, could Autahi put the mixed up story illustrations in the right order and tell the story from start to finish? To achieve this, we had to do great listening and sharing of our ideas, a bit of trial and error and some great cooperation.
We were really proud of ourselves when we got it all sorted out!
Maths
Here's a letter from the Big Wolf Building Company asking for Autahi's help. Could we help them to build houses for the Three Little Pigs? How many chimneys, windows and doors would we need for their houses? This was a challenging maths problem for us to solve, but in a context that we all understood. This meant that we could get straight into the problem-solving and everyone could be involved.
Writing
After sequencing the story, we all really understood how it worked. Each person chose an illustration to write about. They were able to pick out just that part of the story and write a sentence or two about it.
On the surface, fairy tales are very simple - but nothing could be further from the truth. They are full of knotty problems and moral dilemmas. Here we discussed: Goldilocks a good person?. This is a question that everyone can have an opinion about since we all the know the story. And there are some big topics in the mix here, for example: can you still be a good person even if you make mistakes?
Art
So many opportunities here. And, of course, creating art helps us to get closer to the stories by providing more chances to talk and think about them.
Hansel and Gretel inspired fairy tale maps of magical forests and woodcutters' cottages painted and made in 3D with found objects.
And we created designs for cottages made from candy - delicious (but watch out for that naughty witch!).
