Posts tagged ‘princesses’
48. The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch
Retell: After a fire-breathing dragon destroys her castle, Elizabeth dons a paper bag and goes off to rescue the ‘charming’ Prince Ronald. Through cunning wit she tricks the dragon and frees the prince only to realize that perhaps he wasn’t worth saving after all.
Topics: fairy tales, dragons, princesses, princes
Units of Study: Fantasy, Social Issues, Talking and Writing About Texts
Tribes: personal best, mutual respect
Habits of Mind: persisting, managing impulsivity, thinking flexibly, striving for accuracy
Reading Skills: interpretation, inference
Writing Skills: writing interesting dialogue
My Thoughts: This is a TC read aloud classic that I have seen used in several workshops on planning effective interactive read alouds. For such a short book, there are many ways you could teach with it. It’s a great book for discussing gender issues during the Social Issues unit. After rereading this book for the 20th time I just realized what a great text it is for teaching the Habits of Mind. Elizabeth uses a lot of them! For example, her entire castle burns down but she persists and goes to save Prince Ronald. She has no clothes but thinks flexibly and fashions a dress out of a paper bag. After competely exhausting the dragon she strives for accuracy and manages impulsivity by checking to make sure the dragon is truly knocked out.
44. Shrek! by William Steig
Retell: Shrek is proud to be an ugly ogre. He loves everything disgusting and enjoys scaring people around him. One day he visits a fortune teller who tells him that he is destined to meet a princess even uglier than he. With the help of a donkey he travels to the castle, defeats a knight and meets the princess of his dreams.
Topics: ogres, nightmares, monsters, fortune tellers
Units of Study: Fantasy
Reading Skills: monitoring for sense, envisionment
Writing Skills: using rhyme, including interesting vocabulary
My Thoughts: I never realized how different the original story was from the movie. The movie version has a much stronger moral more lesson but that doesn’t mean Steig’s classic does not have value as a read aloud. I think this book lends itself quite well to modeling how readers monitor for sense. Steig writes with rich vocabulary. His characters never walk, speak, or work. Rather they, stalk, hiss, and scythe. Giggle alert: the story includes the word jackass, which refers of course to the donkey in the story. Read aloud with discretion.
Teachable Texts 