Folktales: Wolves, Pigs & Bears!

We have been extremely busy with our folktale unit!  I have to say this is one of my favorite units to teach,  It brings back wonderful memories of my grandma telling me these stories at bedtime when I was young and would spend the night with her.

Folktales are a great way to teach about character traits.   These stories by James Marshall have great examples of different traits that the students can easily pick out.  

As we find new traits, they go on our character trait anchor charts.

After we are finished with the book, I put a copy of the cover on the wall and we take some of the character trait cards from the anchor charts and place them on the wall.  Students have learned to then use this wall to help them think of character traits for new books.  It can also help them to compare characters from different books.

We are working hard to be able to prove our answers using evidence from the text.  You can grab this character trait FREEBIE by clicking here if it is something you could use.  You will find other freebies listed on this page too!

In the past we have compared the wolves from The Three Little Pigs and from The Three Little Wolves.  

Comparing the pigs is a great way to practice comparing characters too.

Another way to use evidence from the text is to prove that a story is a folktale or not.  

The kids can really see how a character changes in a story during this activity using the book The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig.  Which by the way is a great book!  Boys especially love this book and the twist on the traditional Three Little Pigs!

Brand new listing for those of you teaching multisyllabic close syllable words.  These kind of activities are hard to find and this one is a lot of fun!