Compare and Contrast of Folktale Wolves

          Whew!  We finally finished up our folktale/author study.  We learned so many things about folktales and did so many comparisons and had a lot of fun along the way.  I posted before about our first folktale in this unit and you can find it here.  Our first folktale was Three Little Pigs.  We then moved on to Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks and the Three Bears-all retold by James Marshall.

          For each book, students had to prove whether the story was really a folktale or not.  They got really good at finding the evidence for this before the entire story was even read!

          Here is the document for proving whether a story is a folktale or not.  You are welcome to use it if you have a need for it in your classroom.

          Another activity that we did was compare and contrast the wolves from The Three Little Pigs and Red Riding Hood.  This was the favorite activity that we did for the students.  First we compared and contrasted the wolves in a Venn diagram.  The Smartboard makes my Venn diagrams look so nice, but unfortunately that picture wouldn't load for you.  After filling out our Venn diagrams, we then wrote in paragraph form about how the wolves were similar and how they were different in the folktales.

          Also as we read each folktale, we filled out our comparison chart.  This allowed us to see the many similarities and differences between the three stories.  I loved when we filled out the connections area and the students were figuring out how one story reminded them in some way of one of the other folktales.

          As you can see, we did a lot of work with this unit, but learned a lot and had a lot of fun with it too.  The kids decided that we can learn a lot of good advice from a folktale to keep us safe (see the theme part of the chart).