Whether it’s The Princess and the Rutabaga or Big Blue Riding Hood, invite your students to turn familiar fairy tales upside down and inside out – and to have fun. This interactive tool gives students a choice of three fairy tales to read. They are then guided to choose a variety of changes, which they use to compose a fractured fairy tale to print off and illustrate. Useful for teaching point of view, setting, plot, as well as fairy tale conventions such as they lived happily ever after, this tool encourages students to use their imaginations and the writing process at the same time.

Visit this interactive tool at: http://www.readwritethink.org/materials/fairytales/.

ReadWriteThink Lessons That Use This Tool

Behind the Scenes With Cinderella (3-5)
This lesson invites students to explore two different versions of Cinderella and to make connections between story background elements (e.g., setting) and cross-curricular topics (e.g., geography and science). Students use literature and the Internet to research and create a variety of language arts activities to showcase their knowledge.

Critical Literacy: Point of View (6-8)
By the sixth grade, most students are able to identify point of view in texts by recognizing writing in the first person, second person, and third person. In this lesson, students learn to look at texts from different viewpoints. Was the "big bad wolf" really bad? Throughout the lesson, students are encouraged to view texts from different angles.

Enchanting Readers with Revisionist Fairy Tales (6-8)
This lesson asks students to examine three examples of revisionist fairy tales—a book, a graphic novel, and a poem—in which female characters act in empowered roles rather than behaving helpless and submissive, which is often the case in traditional folk or fairy tales.

Engaging Students in Read-Alouds Using Fractured Texas Tales (K-2)
This lesson involves read-alouds of traditional fairy tales and their Wild West counterparts to engage students in reading responses. Each session also includes suggestions for supporting English-language learners.

Exploring Satire with Shrek (9-12)
The movie Shrek, which satirizes fairy tale traditions, serves as an introduction to the satirical techniques of exaggeration, incongruity, reversal, and parody. Students brainstorm fairy tale characteristics, identify the satirical techniques used to present them in the movie, then create their own satirical versions of fairy tales.

Once Upon a Fairy Tale: Teaching Revision as a Concept (6-8)
Students sometimes have trouble understanding the difference between the global issues of revision and the local ones of editing. In this lesson, students use fractured fairy tales to enhance understanding and then practice revision and editing as separate activities when they write their own versions of other fairy tales.

Once Upon a Link: A PowerPoint Adventure With Fractured Fairy Tales (3-5)
Fractured fairy tales with hyperlinks offer multiple pathways to happily ever after. Students use the Fractured Fairy Tales tool and a PowerPoint template to create stories that offer alternate plotlines and endings. In composing and editing these tales, students focus on the six traits of writing.

Once Upon a Time Rethought: Writing Fractured Fairy Tales (3-5)
Using prior knowledge of the genre, students identify common elements of fairy tales. Next, they read and analyze fairy tales, using a story map. The information from the graphic organizer will assist students as they rewrite one of their favorite fairy tales, changing one of the literary elements.

Teaching About Story Structure Using Fairy Tales (K-2)
This lesson for second-grade and late first-grade students uses familiar fairy tales and nursery rhymes to teach about story structure. These stories ultimately serve as inspiration for student writing, which is scaffolded through three levels: shared writing, guided writing, and independent writing.

This is My Story: Encouraging Students to Use a Unique Voice (3-5)
Voice is what gives personality to a piece of writing, but it can be difficult to write in a voice that is distinctive. This lesson encourages students to recognize and use their own unique voices by studying the work of other writers before writing on their own.