Hellobee

When the summer started, I knew exactly how I wanted to kick off our time together. Since I was young, I have always loved fairy tales. Even as a grownup I adore reading and watching all the different variations of the stories, and I wanted explore them with my kids. I could have spent the whole summer looking at fairy tales, but I decided to stick with two weeks (I wasn’t even sure I could hold their attention for that long). I had them begging for a Star Wars and Superhero week, so I knew two would be the max I could do.

I decided to plan a week for the Grimm Brothers and then move on to Hans Christen Anderson. I went with these two authors because I found two anthologies of the original stories. I also have several books like A Treasury of Children’s Literature by Armand Eisen that contains many of the stories I wanted to use. We looked at our local library and our own personal books to find as many versions of the stories as we could find. The kids had a fantastic time comparing the different versions. We even made it a bit of a game to find as many differences as we could.

Throughout the two weeks I had one project that we worked on the whole time. We built our own fairy tale alphabet book. Each day we worked on a few letters that connected with the story for the day. I made letter practice pages by writing the letter at the top, then having a few dotted examples to trace. The kids traced the dots and also practiced on their own.  For each letter I had a corresponding picture that they could color and paste on the page. At the end we had our finished book.

James working on his F is for Frog page

Each day during their snack time, I let them watch an episode from Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre.  These were one of my favorite things to watch as a kid, and I was so excited to share them with my kids. In the evenings if there was a corresponding movie, we sometimes watched the Disney version and again looked for differences in the stories. Often my kids were able to see how drastically the story was changed in the Disney versions.

M O N D A Y

– We read The Frog Prince from our Anthologies and a second version from the library by Kathy-Jo Wargin.

– We did the Letter F for Frog, K for King and X for Xenopus (Yeah I know it’s a stretch but xenopus is a genus of frog.  Seriously if anyone can think of better x words I am all ears. Fairy tale X words are tough)

– We played a little math game with the paper lily pads and cut out frogs. I drew a lily pad on a sheet of paper for each kid.  Then I cut out 12 small paper frogs for each kid.  We had a dice and we went around the circle rolling the dice and adding the number of frogs to the lily pad. Each time we counted together as someone added their frogs. Then we counted the total frogs and tried to keep track of who had more or less frogs. My goal was to sneak in a little bit of beginning math skills while also playing a game which my kids love to do.

Our home made lily pad math game

– I printed out the life cycle of the frog  and we made a song called grow up little froggy. I don’t know the exact words because they change a bit each time, as does the melody. Last week the kids asked me to sing it as a lullaby. I was forced to sing it in front of Mr. Train and admit that we had made up a silly song about how a frog goes from a tadpole to a frog.  But I must say a month later they are still singing that song so I guess it had an impact.

– We also made a paper plate frog. I just made some basic leg shapes and we glued them onto the paper plate.  I let the kids go to town with the markers and we came up with some very exciting and colorful frogs.

Paper plate frogs

T U E S D A Y

– We read the actual text for Rapunzel.  It was a little long and I lost Lilly’s (2.5 years old) attention towards the end, but the boys (almost 5 years old) listened to the end.

– We did the letter P for princess (she is not a Princess in the original story so we talked about her marrying the prince and becoming a princess), R for Rapunzel and Y for yellow hair.

– I printed out some pictures of Rapunzel’s tower and we painted them with watercolors.

– We watched Disney’s Tangled and talked about the differences in the stories.

W E D N E S D A Y

– We read Cinderella by Max Eilenberg, Dinorella by Pamela Duncan, and a Disney Little Golden book.

– Our letters were C for Cinderella, G for glass slipper, and Z for Waltz with an emphasis on the last letter (OK, another stretch but I was stumped for Z too).

– I cut out different shapes and sizes of shoes along with corresponding sized feet.  They had to match the right sizes and figure out which foot belonged in each shoe.

I am not the best at drawing feet but the kids knew what they were, so that is all that matters to me.

We put some famous waltzes on youtube and had some dance lessons. They mostly wanted to dance with me, but I finally got Lilly to dance with Joe. Nick and James just jumped around and started slamming into each other.  They aren’t really that graceful yet, but I loved having them listen to some classical music even if they were just running around the room.

Dance Partners

– We did several activities with soap as we talked about Cinderella having to clean the house.

– I put water and oil in a mason jar and let them shake it up.  They were able to see the water and oil separate from each other quickly. I added dish soap to each one and when they mixed the contents together, it made a cloudy mixture with the oil not immediately rising to the top. We talked about how soap works and how it allows the oil to break into smaller parts when it is surround by the soap and water mixture.

– I also put oil on their hands and had them try to wash it with just water versus adding soap.

– Then we took a bowl of water and sprinkled pepper on top.  The pepper stayed on top due to the surface tension of the water. I let each kid stick their finger in the bowl with and without soap on their fingers.  When they did it with soap it broke the surface tension and all the pepper sunk.

– Then we made a huge mess with blowing bubbles and we went through a ton of dishwashing saop.  I should say that I did all of these activities outside on the porch so I could hose everything off (including the kids).

There are so many fun soap science experiments, we just had a blast.

T H U R S D A Y

– We read Snow white and the seven dwarfs by Joan Aiken.

– Our letters were A for apple, D for dwarfs, and V for vain.

– We made caramel apple slices.  We cut apples in half and took out their core.  I made this caramel sauce and fill the middle of each apple.  We let those sit in the fridge for a bit and then had them for dessert.

– We made magic mirrors.  I cut up an old box into hand mirror shapes.  We covered the tops in aluminum foil.  Then the kids picked what color they wanted.  I cut construction paper for the front and back.  The kids glued the papers on then we decorated with beads and shells.

Lilly is still carrying hers around saying “Mirror Mirror in my hand who is the fairest of the land.”

– We watched Disney’s Snow White because it is one of Lilly’s favorite princesses.

F R I D A Y

– We read Hansel and Gretel from our anthology.

– Our letters were H for Hansel and W for witch.

– We made sun dials out of a shoe box and a straw.  Throughout the day we came out to see where the shadows were.  They marked their paper with a crayon to show where the shadow was.  It wasn’t exact because they kept moving their straw and their boxes, but in general they got the point that the shadows were moving throughout the day. We talked about being able to tell time based on the sun and how Hansel and Gretel may have been able to tell how long they had been alone in the forest.

DIY sun dials — not perfect but they got the job done.

– We went out into the back yard and collected stones in buckets.  Then we went to my parents’ back yard.  Each kid took turns making a trail and then we had to follow the trail they had made with their stones.

– I should warn you.  In some of Grimm’s fairy tales there are some gruesome parts. The stepsisters in Cinderella cut their toes and heels off to fit the shoe. The evil queen in Snow White is made to dance at Snow White’s wedding in iron shoes until she falls down dead. There are plenty of versions out there that don’t include these parts, so just be careful and read through things yourself first. Every picture book I have found leaves these details out, but if you read the original text those details are there.

– On Saturday we took them to a production of Rapunzel.  There is a theater near us that does kids’ productions throughout the summer.  They were so excited to see it acted out in real life, and again the story was slightly different so we got to compare it with what we learned earlier in the week.  The kids loved the stories and were excited for the ones I told them were coming up the next week.  I told them we were going to look at other fairy tales including the one that Frozen was based on so of course they were excited.