Students will explore the transmission of folktales over time and continent to evaluate their validity of a literary genre. By reading and analyzing a variety of folktales, students will realize the cultural implications of the genre. Students will create and perform their own original folktale in the form of a script that combines and modernizes the tales that they read. Learning will enhanced by technology infusion and the incorporation of 21 Century learning competencies.


Driving Question: How can folktales give us insight into other cultures? Why do we continue to tell and retell the same old stories?

Summary I began my 21st Century journey this year hoping to create a classroom blog. My main goal was to allow parents a glimpse into their child’s daily life at school. I pictured students blogging daily about what we were up to in class and parents commenting and asking questions regularly. This, unfortunately, was not the case. I encountered problem after problem until the idea just fizzled by the wayside. So, on to the next idea! A few years ago, I attended a session by a teacher who was doing stop-motion animation with her class. I latched onto that idea and quickly purchased the iMotion app. I started making videos with my five year old son (who loved it!!!) and soon felt comfortable enough to introduce the technology to my class. The students were very excited to try it! We had only one problem… we only had one ipad. Several students got the opportunity to create a stop-motion animation as part of a book report project. (They did a stop-motion animation in place of creating a diorama.) However, most students did not get a chance to try it due to time limitations with only one ipad. Out of the students who did not get to create a stop-motion animation, a couple of them asked if they could create a digital diorama using Minecraft. Several other students overheard and wanted to do one too. I was curious to see what they would do so I allowed them to try it. The results were fantastic!!! We connected each students’ personal device to the SmartBoard to present their dioramas to the rest of the class. (We learned that we can’t use the airwatch to have a “live” diorama on the SmartBoard, but we fixed that problem by taking still pictures (screenshots) of the scene and displaying it that way.)