Cinderella

Three Versions of Cinderella

Cinderella or The Little Glass Slipper by Charles Perrault

This version of Cinderella is one of the more popular versions of the story. Written in 1697 by Charles Perrault, it tells the story of a girl who becomes the slave to her step sisters. Luckily she has a godmother who fits her with beautiful clothes and glass slippers so she can go to the kings ball. At the end of the story the prince falls in love with Cinderella and she allows her sisters to move into the palace with her.

Cinderella by the Brothers Grimm

This version of Cinderella was written in the 19th century. It differs from Perrault’s version in that Cinderella gets her beautiful dress and shoes by shaking a tree planted at her mothers grave. Also, the step sisters attempt to fit into Cinderella’s shoes by cutting off parts of their foot. In the end of this story Cinderella gets whisked away with the prince and in the later versions the sisters eyes get pecked out by pigeons leaving them blind.

 

The Egyptian Cinderella by Shirley Climo

This rendition of the story was written in 1992 and gives a different spin to the original story. Rhodopis was stolen from her home in Greece and brought to Egypt to be a slave. The other servants tease her because she is different. Her master sees her dance and gives her a beautiful pair of rosy red slippers. She goes to the Pharaoh’s court and leaves a shoe behind. Later the Pharaoh finds her and declares her the most Egyptian of all.

Lesson Plan

Compare and Contrast

Lesson Plan: 5th Grade

This lesson will allow students to analyze three different versions of Cinderella. They will   read each fairy tale as a class and discuss the similarities and differences between the three. Then they will have the opportunity to reenact what they have learned either by acting it out, writing a poem or song, or doing an interpretive dance.

Day 1: Introduction
On the first day of this lesson I will gather the students around to discuss what they know about fairy tales. We will discuss that fact that there are different versions of most fairy tales by talking about the origin of fairy tales, folklore, and the oral tradition of storytelling. I will introduce the lesson by reading three different versions of Cinderella (Cinderella or The Little Glass Slipper by Charles Perrault, Cinderella by the Brothers Grimm, and The Egyptian Cinderella by Shirley Climo). Then we will put up three large pieces of paper and write down what we noticed about each story as a class.

Day 2: Group Project Work
Allow students to break up into groups according to which story they liked the most. Give them time to reread their version of Cinderella as a group. Ask them to reenact what happened in their story any way they’d like: through dance, readers theater, writing a poem or song, etc. Give them time to work on their projects as a group while walking around to see how things are going or if anyone needs help.

Day 3: Performances
On the last day of the lesson students will perform their reenactments of their version of Cinderella. After everyone has had a chance to perform the class will come back together as a group to discuss what we have learned about fairy tales. End the lesson by making a Venn diagram of all three versions of CInderella as a class.

Additional Resources

http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0510a.html

• This website contains 23 different versions of the story of Cinderella

http://learningtogive.org/lessons/unit205/lesson1.html

• This website contains a creative lesson plan for kindergarten - second grade

http://www.lessonplanspage.com/LATheEgyptianCinderella23.htm

• This website contains a lesson plan using The Egyptian Cinderella for second and third grade

Dundes, A. (1988) Cinderella: A casebook. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press.

• This book contains various versions of Cinderella and can be used as a resource for both the teacher and students

Goldilocks and the Three Bears

Three Versions of Goldilocks

The Story of the Three Bears by Joseph Jacobs

Link: http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/goldilocks/stories/jacobsoriginal.html

    This story from England is the closest version to the original tale first published by Robert Southey in 1837. It tells the story of a little old woman who invades the home of three bears while they’re out letting their breakfast porridge cool. The “impudent, bad old woman” helps herself to an entire bowl of porridge, swears after breaking the smallest chair, and naps “upon the bed of the Little, Small, Wee Bear, and that was neither too high at the head nor at the foot, but just right.”
    When the bears return they are upset to see their home has been disturbed. When the smallest bear finds the old woman asleep in his bead, his high, squeaky voice wakes her up and “out the little old Woman jumped; and whether she broke her neck in the fall; or ran into the wood and was lost there; or found her way out of the wood, and was taken up by the constable and sent to the House of Correction for a vagrant as she was, I cannot tell. But the Three Bears never saw anything more of her.”

Scrapefoot by Joseph Jacobs

Link: http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/goldilocks/stories/scrapefoot.html

    Scrapefoot is another English Tale that introduces a character that most of us have never heard of; a fox named Scrapefoot. Scrapefoot lived in the same woods as the three bears and although they scared him, he was also very curious about them. One day he decided to enter the castle that housed the bears to do some exploring. He tried out all three chairs, tasted three saucers of milk, and fell fast asleep in the littlest bed.
    When the bears found Scrapefoot asleep, they debated whether they should hang him, drown him, or throw him out the window. The latter was his fate, but Scrapefoot survived and ran all the way home, never to return to the bear’s castle again.

The Three Bears by James Taylor Adams

Link: http://www2.ferrum.edu/applit/texts/the3bears.htm

    This Appalachian version of the story includes a little girl (though she is never called Goldilocks) who went out into the woods to pick flowers for her grandmother’s birthday. After discovering she is lost, she wanders through the woods until she discovers a little house. After tip-toeing inside, she samples three bowls of sweet milk, sits in three chairs, and falls asleep in the “teeniweeny” bed.
    It turns out that the little house belonged to a family a bears, “the old big daddy bear, the little mother bear and the teeniweeny baby bear.” The sleeping girl is discovered by the baby bear who lays in his bed and says, “’Oh! Somebody's has been layin' on my bed an' they are layin' here now.’” The little girl wakes up and runs scared from the house all the way home and “she got there with the flowers she'd held to all the time and give them to her grandmother.”

Additional Resources:

History: http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/goldilocks/history.html
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3k4_rEaTy4
Songs: http://dragon.sleepdeprived.ca/songbook/songs4/S4_36.htm
Essays:

Goswami, Usha. "Transitive Relational Mappings in Three- and Four-Year-Olds: The Analogy of Goldilocks and the Three Bears." Child Development 66.3 (1995): 877. Academic Search Premier. Web. 13 June 2011.

De Rijke, Victoria. "Goldilocks And The Three Bears By Lauren Child." The Art Book 16.4 (2009): 80. Academic Search Premier. Web. 13 June 2011.

Hansel and Gretel

Materials and Resources:
 

1. Hansel and Gretel. Dir. Robert Eggers. Palehorse Productions, 2005. Film.

2. Peterson, Andrea L. No Rest for the Wicked. Icarus Falls, 2003. Web. 14 June 2011. http://www.forthewicked.net/

3. Glennon, William. Hansel and Gretel. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Playhouse Press, c1964. Print.

Descriptions of Resources:

1. This live-action film, in black and white, is a silent movie depicting the traditional telling of Hansel and Gretel. There are only slight differences, one of them being that the children decide to run away to the woods when they get punished for their disobedience and troublemaking, as opposed to the more traditional evil-stepmother-telling-the-father-to-get-rid-of-the-children story.

2. No Rest for the Wicked is a webcomic that combines many different Grimm’s fairy tales into one storyline. The Hansel and Gretel portion comes into play in chapter three, entitled “A Modest Proposal”, which is a nod to Jonathan Swift’s satirical essay of the same name. Here, the story is interpreted entirely differently. A village has fallen on hard times, and so parents give their children to a witch living deep in the heart of the forest so the parents will not starve. This witch, due to severe mental instability, calls all the boys Hansel and all the girls Gretel, after her own children who have been dead for many years. It is revealed that she killed and ate her own children after going insane, and the experience has changed her from a normal human woman to a lifeless shell of an evil being.

3. This is a play written in three acts. The witch has a bird and a gnome as her helpers, and the witch puts Hansel and Gretel’s mother under a spell that causes her to abandon Hansel and Gretel in the woods. The rest of the story plays out very much the same, with rhyming banter and such added in for theatrics.

Lesson Plan for Number Five: 

“Graphic Fairy Tales” Middle School

Art Goals

• To interpret a fairy tale in the form of a graphic novel or comic

• To learn the process of making comics

Content Objectives

The students will each choose an old fairy tale, one that hasn’t been turned into a popular movie, and create a comic around it. During the process, they will design characters and scenery based on the descriptions from the story. They will need to be aware of and use all elements of design in the creation of their comics.

Motivations

The students will research fairy tales that have been turned into comics or graphic novels. In class, they will all share what did and did not work in each comic, as well as discuss how they could use what they’ve learned in the making of their own comics.

Materials Needed

• Drawing paper (8 ½”x 11”)

• Pencils (2H)

• India ink pens, various sizes

• Rulers

• Erasers

• White-out/ white ink

Resources

• Library/ internet

Process/ Procedure

1. Read and discuss fairy tale comics
2. Choose a fairy tale to read
3. Script out the fairy tale (i.e. dialogue, action cues, settings)
4. Make thumbnail drafts of the comic: very loose sketches and panel layouts
5. Get into groups of three or four and discuss each other’s thumbnails
6. Edit thumbnails based on the critiques within your groups if necessary
7. Bring thumbnails to the teacher to discuss
8. Start work on the comic!
9. Graph out the pages and panels
10. Sketch out the contents of the panels, including the text [Note: When dealing with speech bubbles, write out the text FIRST, then draw the bubbles around the text.]
11. Ink the panels and the speech bubbles first, then move on to inking the contents of the panels and the text.
12. After the ink has dried, erase all pencil lines and fix inking mistakes using white-out or white ink.
13. Sign and date the bottom of each page and pass it in. These will all be scanned into a computer and compiled into a bound collection for each student in the class.