Around the World Fairytales Part 1

Our guest blogger today is Tricia Weyhrenberg who works at the Amery Public Library in northern Wisconsin.  Tricia recently received her MLIS. While working on her degree she had a chance to research different cultural versions of Cinderella. This inspired her to create a program in her final assignment that explores the rich cross-cultural possibilities of a fairy tale program. Today's post begins with her description of how she would create the beginning of her program. Tomorrow she describes her thoughts behind story extension stations.

Collection Connection

I think it’d be fun to do a series of three different fairytales and explore the different cultural versions of each, along with some fun crafts and activities from each of those cultures.  This would be a three part series, Hour of Enchantment, for school age children (ages 6-11, but could be adaptable for a younger audience as well) with one session focusing on one of each of these three tales: Cinderella, Snow White, and Jack and the Beanstalk.

My vision for this is to read a couple of the different variations picture book fairy tales, and then to break out and have the children do different crafts at stations I’ve set up, as well as play some cultural games I’ve researched prior to the program. I’d present in front of the group for about 15 minutes or so and the rest of the time I can walk around and just hang out with them while they have fun with the stations I have set up.

By reading a couple of the books and then having the others available on display, it would encourage families to look through these and possibly check them out. I’d also point them towards our nonfiction fairytale section of the library if they wanted to browse for other titles they may like or if they’d like to prepare for next week’s theme as well as point them to the nonfiction titles that may correlate to the cultures we learned about that day as well.

If I were doing the Cinderella program in the series, I would read two different versions of the story for the first 15-20 minutes of the program. I’d start with a version that is very familiar to them such as Cinderella by Barbara McClintock, and then I’d move on to one that is a bit more fractured from what they usually know, such as the Caribbean version, Cendrillon by Robert D. San Souci. There’s still magic and a fairy godmother, but the whole story is shown from the fairy godmother’s point of view. I’d flip through a few of the other versions just to show some of the illustrations and the contrast between those. I’d discuss the cultures and their influence in our crafts and activities for the day.