In this unit, students will become familiar with fables and trickster tales from different cultural traditions and will see how stories change when transferred orally between generations and cultures. They will learn how both types of folktales employ various animals in different ways to portray human strengths and weaknesses and to pass down wisdom from one generation to the next. Use the following lessons to introduce students to world folklore and to explore how folktales convey the perspectives of different world cultures.

Groups of students read and discuss American folklore stories, each group reading a different story. Using a jigsaw strategy, the groups compare character traits and main plot points of the stories. A diverse selection of American folk tales is used for this lesson, which is adaptable to any text set.

This lesson can be used with numerous pieces of literature, videos or cassette material to develop viewing and listening skills and the students ability to compare and contrast. One of the richest sources is in the area of fairytales and folktales. This an especially good source if you can find a modernized version in video or cassette form to contrast with the more traditional written form. I have used the "Frog Prince" because of this factor and because it was part of the 4th grade language arts reading unit.

The folktale ŕHalf-ChickenĚŇ is about a chicken hatched with only half a body, one leg, one wing, one eye, and only half as many feathers as the other chicks.

Introduction to Literature: Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, and How They Shape Us introduces college students to the study of literature through a focus on texts that, generally, they already know, or think they know, and how those texts aim to shape audiences to be compliant members of their culture.

Korean Through Folktales consists of four chapters and each centers on a famous Korean folktale. The lessons and values that famous folktales teach are embedded and permeated in various aspects of the Koran culture. Using folktales in the curriculum will provide an engaging way to expose students to a slice of the target culture that native Koreans are naturally exposed to at an early age. Through the selected folktales and various activities offered in the book, students can gain cultural knowledge and insights into traditional and cultural values while they are given linguistic lessons to reinforce their acquired skills and to apply the learned materials in an integrated approach.
Korean Through Folktales is designed to accompany 1st-year, 2nd-year, and 3rd-year Korean courses offered at Portland State University. However, any Korean teacher can adopt this book to supplement his/her course materials at elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels.
There are four chapters in the book. Each chapter will note main themes of a widely known folktale introduced in the chapter, followed by the links to several videos to watch and get a gist or a background of the story. The ensuing section will introduce important elements and symbolism embedded in the story so as to provide insights and to enhance the depth of appreciation. After that, three versions of the folktale are presented for different levels, followed by grammar lessons, exercises, and tasks.
Traces of folktales and allusions to them are evident in cultural products that many students enjoy, such as dramas, movies, and music. Therefore, knowledge in folktales will help students make cultural connections as well as enrich their experience of learning the Korean language.

Following the model of N. Scott Momaday's The Way To Rainy Mountain, students write three-voice narratives based on Kiowa folktales, an interview with an Elder, and personal connections to theme.

In this folktale, the town of Barletta faces destruction until Zia Concetta asks the towns giant statue for help. With a clever idea, help from the townspeople and an onion, the giant outwits the army and restores peace

This story is a folktale about a princess named Aziza who chooses her husband based on his answer to a math riddle. After traveling the kingdom, many suitors (a scholar, a merchant, and a soldier) try to answer her riddle but to no avail. A simple farmer is able to easily solve the riddle and that is who she chooses as her husband.

This resource is a pacing guide for a course in Global Studies that includes nine units. Each unit contains information on its historical content, written content, time frame, and skills or projects related to the unit material. 

Storytelling is the oldest form of transmitting knowledge. Students in the 21st century need to be able to analyze and interpret stories in film as well as written text. In this unit students will analyze and compare four texts which contain embedded stories and magical realism, two narrative structures that can trouble readers but offer extraordinary riches. The central novel of the unit is the award-winning Kit’s Wilderness by David Almond which alludes to the fairy tale The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen, a complex story that is actually taken up at the start of the unit. Kit’s Wilderness draws on the healing power of stories interwoven with topics of geology and dementia. The central film of the unit is The Secret of Roan Inish by John Sayles. A masterful work, it will provide a forum for analyzing cinematography as well as storytelling. Students can compare the use of magical realism and embedded stories in the novel and the film.

Students will then create their own stories, framing a fairy tale within it. They will also choose a novel and compare it to its adaptation.

This folktale is about three monks who visit a village filled with unhappy people. The villagers do not welcome the monks, so the three monks decide to make stone soup to teach the villagers a lesson in happiness.

This African folk tale explains how many African tales came to be known as ŕSpider stories.ĚŇ In this tale, Ananse, the Spider man, travels up to the sky to offer to buy Nyame, the Sky Gods, stories. Nyame asks Ananse to bring him Osebo the leopard-of-the-terrible-teeth, Mmboro the hornets-who-sting-like-fire, and Mmoatia the fairy-whom-men-never-see. Ananse agrees to the price but Nyame believes that Ananse is too small and weak to accomplish such a task. Ananse uses his intelligence and cunning to trick all three creatures. He returns to Nyame with payment for his stories. Nyame calls his court together to sing the praises of Ananse and declares his stories ŕSpider stories.ĚŇ

These two Google Sheets were created to assist teachers using the Legends and Folktales "Lecture" found here: https://www.oercommons.org/courses/legends-and-folktales

The videos are organized by theme on Sheet 1. On Sheet 2, problematic or adult/mature themes are noted as this was originally published as a third grade "lecture". There are some fantastic, concise, interesting videos on the site, but they are jumbled by theme and it is time consuming to search through them. This list was created to save teachers time.

The author is not affiliated with the Department of Defense or the Defense Language Institute - Foreign Language Center.

Folk tales and fairy tales are of interest to and part of the language arts curriculum for young learners. This lesson supports the study of this genre and the study of irregular patterns and letter-sound relationships related to decoding and spelling. After reading the folk tale Jack and the Beanstalk, students discuss the word giant and its beginning sound. Students then create their own lists of words that begin with the same sound. Then, students are introduced to words with the soft g sound and create a new list of words with this beginning sound. As a culminating activity, students work individually or in groups to categorize animal names into groups according to their beginning g sound.

A folk tale and fairy tale unit plan created for use with third graders.