We’ve been talking about fairy tales in 2nd grade this spring, and it’s a surprisingly hard thing to define. I’ve been reading piles of information, ideas, suggestions from other librarians, etc. about how to define fairy tales. I know one when I see one, but how do you explain that to 7-year-olds? Most resources suggest that fairy tales are a subgenre of folktales. So I’d start defining a folktale as a story passed down for generations, I’d explain to the kids how years and years ago not everyone was taught to read and write, we keep them in nonfiction because they tell us about the places they came from, etc. We talked a lot about how folktales don’t have authors because they’ve been around so long that we don’t know who first invented the story. So when you look at books of folktales, they’ll say “Retold by” or “Edited by” instead of “Written by.”
Archive: April 15, 2009