Tell fairy tales and folktales again and again with these dioramas. Even tall tales seem almost real with these miniature settings and characters!

• 1.

  Read folk and fairy tales in picture books. Try to find stories from several cultures and times. Look closely at pictures and listen to the words to find out all about the setting. Talk with classmates about the characters, their appearances, and the way they talk and act.

• 2.

  Build dioramas with recycled items to retell a story's setting and characters. Here's one way to create a diorama in a recycled box. Use your own imagination to build yours.

• 3.

  Use Crayola® Scissors to cut paper to fit in the back of the box.

• 4.

  Cover your art area with newspaper. Make a wet watercolor backdrop by brushing clear water over paper with a Crayola Watercolor Brush. Brush Crayola Washable Watercolors on the wet paper. Swirl and blend colors in your wash. Air dry flat.

• 5.

  Spread Crayola School Glue on the back of your diorama box. Attach the watercolor backdrop.

• 6.

  Shape miniature story characters from Crayola Model Magic. Create your own colors by kneading color from Crayola Washable Markers into white Model Magic. Sculpt each character to show personalities.

• 7.

  Use craft items to decorate your characters. For example, embed feathers for wings and beads for buttons in your damp figures. Add fairy sparkles with Crayola® Glitter Glue. Air dry at least overnight.

• 8.

  Combine Model Magic with chenille stems, plastic bottle caps, and small boxes to make furniture, buildings or other objects in your story's setting. Air dry overnight.

• 9.

  Arrange everything in the box. Glue in place if you want the display to be permanent. Cover the box opening with cellophane if you wish. Glue in place. Air dry.

• 10.

  Use Fairy Folktale Dioramas to retell your original story. Or make up your own new tales. Add your own plot twists and turns to familiar stories. Share your stories with classmates.

Standards

• LA: Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze its development over the course of the text, including its relationship to the characters, setting, and plot; provide an objective summary of the text.
• LA: Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, relevant descriptive details, an dwell-structured event sequences.
• LA: Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.
• LA: Engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions with diverse partners on grade level topics, texts, and issues, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly.
• SS: Describe ways in which language, stories, folktales, music, an d artistic creations serve as expressions of culture and influence behavior of people living in a particular culture.
• VA: Intentionally take advantage of the qualities and characteristics of art media, techniques, and processes to enhance communication of experiences and ideas.
• VA: Select and use the qualities of structures and functions of art to improve communication of ideas.

Adaptations

• Collaborate with the school's librarian to secure a variety of folktales for this lesson.
• Working in small groups, students use their folktale dioramas as inspiration to write original folktales with identifiable morals. Students use a classroom computer to audio-record the original folktale and save the audio file to a classroom computer, attaching it to a digital photograph of the original diorama. Classmates can listen to the original story as class time permits.
• Using the dioramas as inspiration, student teams create a folktale book representing their original story. Each page of the written story is illustrated by members of the team. Provide a space in the classroom to display these folktale books.