LaPaz Home Learning

One TV show that JBug and I love watching together is Once Upon a Time. It’s our weekly mommy-daughter bonding time. Have you seen it? It really is quite clever. But I noticed as we watched that sometimes JBug was unfamiliar with the original fairy-tale storylines behind the characters. For instance, she had no clue who Rumpelstiltskin was, or the story of Hansel and Gretel. Apparently I had failed to read enough Grimm’s to this child! TRAGIC!!!! How could I have missed this? (oh, yeah, 5th child. That’s how)

Anyhow, I decided I needed to remedy this error post haste!

And thus was born “Fairy Tale Theater” an in-depth study covering as many Grimm’s fairy tales as we can stand. We will read, narrate, discuss, scrapbook, and do activities (cooking, science, art, whatever) based on a new tale each week or so. As a fun twist I decided to add a theater component to each tale we study. There will be sock puppets, finger puppets, marionettes, shadow puppets, iMovies and iMotion stop-action animation– whatever  we can think of to creatively re-tell the tales.

So, though this study is only in it’s infancy, I wanted to share our beginnings and update as we go. (This way posts won’t be overwhelmingly long.)

Our first tale is Rapunzel and she is doing a sock-puppet show.

Braiding Rapunzel’s hair.( For this she had to learn to braid.)

Making a Venn diagram comparing the original Rapunzel to the Disney movie Tangled.

Puppet assembly line. Faces and hair done. Now they just need clothes.

The prince in all his royal glory.

The evil enchantress.

Painting the puppet theater (a tri-fold display board).

Now she just needs to finish painting the theater, make the background, practice her lines and perform the show! We will film it with my iPad and for that we have to learn how to operate the  iMovie app. Wish us luck! Hopefully next week we will have a movie to share! I hope you will join us!