Amplify Grade 1 CKLA Knowledge Unit 9: Fairy Tales Celebration Ideas

Fairy Tales is up next in the Amplify Knowledge series. Unit 9 has all of the best stories your students will love to hear, and it is a nice change of pace after so many nonfiction units!

student created fairy tale book retelling all the stories

Gallery

For this unit I used reality and fantasy signs to create a gallery to help my students see the different parts of fairy tales.

My students love debating with each other about where each image should go.

If you would like a free copy of the Reality/Fantasy signs, as well as Heroic/Evil ones, click here.

Student Book

Throughout the unit my students are creating their own fairy tale book, retelling all the tales they have loved to hear.

Rapunzel and The Frog Prince fairy tale retells

After each story we build a story chart for the characters, setting, fantasy elements, problem, solution and ending.

Hansel and Gretel and Jack and the Beanstalk fairy tale retells

They loved illustrating each story for this unit!

Sleeping Beauty and Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale retells

This resource will take you through the entire unit! It also has writing prompts, Venn diagrams, and organizers to compare heroic vs evil characters and more. Click here for a closer look!

Ambience

I love using photo backdrops for each unit, they make the room look more exciting and add more emphasis to our units.

For the fairy tales unit, I have 2 different backdrops I use: an enchanted forest for most of the stories, and a castle for our celebration day! Click here for a copy of all the backdrops I use throughout the year!

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Castle backdrop for our celebration day!

I always love to have ambient videos that connect to our Knowledge unit playing each day.

ambient fairy tale music to set the mood

free download of fairy tale ambient videos

Click here for a free copy of this file. It has 12 fairy tale ambient videos, and 3 fairy tale in the arts videos.

Artwork

Rapunzel illustration from art day CKLA Fairy Tales

Every unit always has a day where my students have free rein to create an art piece that shows what they enjoyed most in the unit.

"Let down your hair!" Rapunzel illustration CKLA Fairy Tales

Afterwords, they write a few sentences about why that part is special to them.

Rumpelstiltskin illustration CKLA Fairy Tales

We always oil pastels, paint sticks and cardstock for these pieces. My students look forward to it each month!

Hansel and Gretel illustration CKLA Fairy Tales

Books

What is a fairy tale unit without some fractured fairy tales? Here are some of my students favorites!

The Wolf Who Cried Boy by Tom B. Free

It's Not Little Red Riding Hood by Josh Funk

It's Not Jack and the Beanstalk by Josh Funk

It's Not Hansel and Gretel by Josh Funk

The Poisoned Apple by Anne Lambelet

Celebration Activity Ideas

Fairy Feast

What's a celebration without a feast? This time it is a magical fairy feast...of sweets served on a "golden" plate à la Sleeping Beauty!

This feast is our most sugary, after having healthy snacks in many of our past celebrations. I always pretend the fairies did it when I left the room...but I know they are on to me!

Decorate a Crown and Scepter

Last year I used white crowns, but a lot of them did not have enough time to decorate them fully.

golden crowns for our fairy tale unit celebration

This year I went with golden crowns that come in 5 different styles with lots of gems and stickers to decorate with.

I also wanted them to have a scepter, and found some scratch ones that worked perfectly!

scratchable scepters for Knowledge Fairy Tale celebration

We have specials in the middle of our celebration, and they LOVED walking to Health in a procession with all their royal finery!

Fractured fairy tales

$fractured fairy tale cards$

Since my students loved hearing all the fractured fairy tale books, I thought they could create their own.

I printed cards from all the stories in the unit, and cut them up so they could mix and match the plots and characters.

They loved creating their own versions!

Help Rapunzel Escape!

For this activity they need to find a way to help Rapunzel escape the tower!

They had a lot of fun using different tools to find ways to help her escape the tower.

I used 3 paper towel rolls to make the tower, but if you wanted a small group or team activity 1 roll would work well too.

They wanted me to cut her hair off (or at least shorter) to fit the story. I have a feeling I may have to next year!

Puppet Station

Another activity is the puppet making station. I put out standard popsicle sticks, jumbo popsicle sticks, paper bags and construction paper and they are free to create any characters they like!