Among the things I love most about our homeschooling week are Fairytale Fridays! While we don’t follow any particular homeschooling philosophy, I am inspired by the importance the Waldorf tradition places on fairy tales.
Shortly before we began our homeschooling this year, I stumbled across a few really great Calla Edition fairytale books at my local bookstore and had to bring home Stories from Hans Christian Andersen (Calla Editions)
(illustrations by Edmund Dulac) and East of the Sun and West of the Moon: Old Tales from the North (Calla Editions)
(illustrations by Kay Neilson). There is something just magical about reading from these magnificent, large, cloth-bound, hardcover books, with their incredibly beautiful illustrations, thick pages adorned with block prints and large, bold font. While not exactly fairytales, we hope to add these other incredible Calla Editions to our collection soon: The Knave of Hearts (Calla Editions)
And so it goes, every Friday we choose one of the fairy tales from these lovely books and read them together. We also choose an activity or two to go along with them. There are many modern-day adaptations of these original fairy tales,
and we enjoy gathering books from the library and the bookstore to compare and contrast. Sometimes we find we like the original story best, and others we find we like the adaptation. One of our favorites is this gorgeous hardback picture book: East O’ the Sun and West O’ the Moon by Naomi Lewis (illustrations by P.J. Lynch). Occasionally, we also watch a movie to go along with our reading.
Some of our favorite activities include finding unusual words in these stories and creating spelling lists from which we then look up the definitions. Using the free puzzle maker at DiscoveryEducation.com, I often take those spelling words and create a word search for my daughter to do. Of course, being the budding little artist that she is, she loves to illustrate scenes from these stories herself and has even written her own sequels and alternate endings. Really, the activities you can plan to go along with these fairytales are endless.
I would love to hear from you about your family’s favorite fairytales, books, and activities!
XO,
Colette
This post was written by Colette D., a new-to-homeschooling mom and a Lesson Pathways Blog contributing writer. She and her husband raise their daughter together in the rural countryside of Upstate New York, where they like to spend as much time as possible being creative and enjoying nature. She blogs about her adventures in sewing, crafting, and baking (among other things) at YearofHandMade.
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