Traveling Through Tales

In honor of the Fairy Tale Wax Museum, we recently began reading the book The Land of Stories: The Wishing Spell by Chris Colfer. This story is about twins who discover a fairy tale world through a magic portal in a book given to them by their grandmother. We've been LOVING this book so far, and to celebrate our love of this story we re-created the map of The Land of Stories! 

Each of us worked together to re-create each of the kingdoms and landmarks in The Land of Stories and added them to our big map

Now that our map is complete, we will be tracking Alex and Connor's adventures as they travel through each of the kingdoms, meeting many of our favorite fairy tale characters along the way!

Exploring Fairy Tales

This week, the Giraffes have spent a lot of time gearing up for the Fairy Tale Wax Museum, which will be held on Friday, April 7th from 9:00-9:45 for families. We have loved our latest read-aloud book The Land of Stories: The Wishing Spell, and on Monday we created our Land of Stories map! 

We also planted our beanstalks, which will hopefully begin sprouting up to the giant's castle in the clouds soon :)

We've also begun to make our character portraits for the Wax Museum. This year, we are coloring our posters rather than painting them, and they have been turning out wonderfully! The Giraffes are doing a great job taking their time and putting in their best effort when it comes to creating their portraits. 

We have also, of course, been reading lots and LOTS of fairy tales! After familiarizing ourselves with these stories, we've begun working on our storytelling skills to tell these tales in our own words. We practiced telling these stories in selfie videos on Friday that we could re-watch, and we will record a final video to add to our Readbox, which will be on display during the wax museum.

We will continue preparing for our big day in the weeks ahead--the Wax Museum will be here before we know it!

Our Second Annual Fairy Tale Wax Museum

After weeks and weeks of reading many, MANY fairy tales, working on our storytelling skills, studying our characters, and creating (and growing!) all of our materials, it was finally time to open the drawbridge for our Fairy Tale Wax Museum! 

Our portraits were hung around the room, and as soon as we got to school, we finished getting ready and got into our spots so our friends and family could experience the wax museum.

 

All week long, Ms. Riley told the giraffes we would have a new student join us for the day on Friday because he would be moving to Stratham over the summer and wanted to visit for the day--little did they know that new student was actually her brother, who acted as Jack's Giant for the day :)

After a quick snack break, it was time for even more visitors from all over SMS!

After transforming back into the giraffe class and going outside for some extra recess, we FINISHED The Land of Stories(!) and we began to watch a version of Cinderella that combined all of the storytelling aspects we learned about in Reader's Workshop: songs, sound effects, movement, and silly voices! 

Our Fairy Tale Wax Museum was such a success, thanks to the support of our families, all of our time and effort, and eighteen amazingly talented and hard-working giraffes :)