Fairy Tale Adventures

Rapunzel marries Prince Roderick
(after getting to know him over the course
of a year and sacrificing her hair for him)

I think "Fairy Tale Adventures" has been my favorite summer workshop I've taught so far. I had 6 cute little kids (three boys, three girls) all enthusiastically listening to stories with wide eyes, getting dressed up to act out the stories, and making up stories and little plays of their own. I told some of my favorite fairy tales with no book - I love really looking into kids' eyes while telling stories and seeing them get so into it and I love embellishing a story with my own new twists and pointing out every possible applicable lesson taught by each story (Snow White's great for learning about not eating things from strangers and learning that just because someone is beautiful dosn't necessarily mean they're good - the wicked queen was beautiful outside but SO ugly inside, Rumplestitskin teaches us not to brag and not to make promises that would be too hard to keep and how to use our smart brains to find answers and fix problems...).

The queen feels terrible that she made a bad promise to Rumplestiltskin and
fixes the problem by doing lots of research to find out his name and gives him
a position in the palace as a jester and magic tutor to the young prince
so he won't have hard feelings over not being able to take the baby
(Rumplestiltskin's the little guy in the vest)

The kids got to write their own books (so interesting to see what they came up with - robots eating frogs, flower-people who loose their legs if it gets too cold and have to stay rooted like regular flowers, a pig who goes into the woods when her dad told her not to and get's caught by bad guys, a pony who looks different from her friends and feels so sad...). I love stories so much!

Eliza as Rupunzel, Isaac as Roderick and little Jonah as Roderick's trusty horse, Stan

Young men escorting the young ladies to the Royal Tea Party

Here they are making toasts to the various lessons we learned during Fairy Tale Adventures. We had quite a tea party - cucumber and cream cheese sandwiches, banana and peanut butter sandwiches, scones with clotted cream and jam, finger veggies, fruit, cream puffs... The only thing missing was tea but no one seemed to mind - I don't have nice tea cups and the kids like apple juice better anyway!

Next week, it's on to Great Artists. Should be fun (and messy)!