Myths, Legends and Fairy Tales in the WL Classroom

Students explore the elements of myths, legends & fairy tales from their own culture & those in the target culture through exposure to stories from across cultures, reflecting, & comparing stories they have heard, read, & viewed.

Levels: Novice-Intermediate                                                                           Languages: Spanish, German

ICC Can Do Statements:

Investigate: In my culture and others I can identify common elements of traditional stories.

Interact: I can communicate with others from the target culture in familiar everyday situations, using memorized language and showing basic cultural awareness.

Overview of Lesson:

Students are shown pictures and vocabulary of the five  elements of stories. The teacher uses the story of the Three Little Pigs to demonstrate the different elements. 

Students are also encouraged to provide examples for each element from stories that they are familiar with. Teacher highlights examples that represent the target culture. When students provide no examples from the Target Culture (TC), the teacher may offer examples from the TC.

Students will see stories from both their local culture as well as from the TL. We chose stories from the Brothers Grimm, American Tall Tales and a collection of stories representing the broad Spanish speaking world. Further examples from other cultures can also be included.



Student Organizers

As the lesson moves through each story, the teacher highlights the elements of the story as they arise. Students can take notes using a variety of graphic organizers.


     


To compare stories:

    


Students call also follow the story line with a plot diagram.

    

Other Ways to Discuss Stories

    Themes in literature. What themes apply to the story/scene? 
    


    Folktales: What traits does a new story have? Does it match a specific type of story?

    

Reflections
After demonstrating comprehension of a story, students will write a reflection.

  1. Based on the story, can you identify what may be important to that culture?

  1. What do you think was the purpose of the story? Was there a lesson? A moral? A valued trait?

Extension
Write a short story that reflects the values of a cultural group that you belong to.

Interact
You created a story that reflects the values of a cultural group that you belong to.
Share your story with with someone else who also belongs to that cultural group.
Can they compare and contrast the elements and themes of your story to other stories of that cultural group?



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Citizenship and Cultural Identity

Image
Go, Sebastien, Go This lesson is developed around the short video “Go, Sebastien, Go” and has at its core the goal of helping students reflect about their cultural identity while at the same time considering the diverse cultures of the U.S. and how we define citizenship. The video also contains many other relevant topics that we touch on as time allows, including racism and cyberbullying. Students in this example are novice low, but the lesson would be appropriate for any level of Spanish. Since the video is in English, the lesson can be used in a variety of courses, especially if the focus is on U.S. diversity, identity and citizenship. This lesson comes at the end of a unit I teach in which the cultural focus is Hispanics in the United States. Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) and Intercultural Citizenship are goals of this course, so the lesson is intentionally designed to help students reflect on their own culture as they challenge pre-conceived ideas (especially about...
Read more

Rites of Passage in the WL Classroom

Image
Students explore their own rites of passage and those in the target culture through exposure to one rite of passage in the target culture and reflection and comparison of rites of passage they will go through or have already gone through. Image 1      Image 2 Level: Novice Languages: Spanish, German ICC Can-Do Statements: Investigate : In my culture and others I can identify common rites of passage. Interact : I can appropriately greet/congratulate at a rite of passage event from target culture. Overview of Lesson Rites of Passage Slides Students are shown pictures and vocabulary of different rites of passage that are common in their culture. As we go through these slides with pictures and target language. Students are asked if they have been to these events or if they have been through any of these rites of passage. Students are asked how they congratulate/what they would say in L1 for those events. You can see an example of these slides here. The rites of passage we c...
Read more