Fairy Tales for School

One of the downsides to the way we do homeschooling is that my kids pretty much expect me to do “school” with them year round. If daddy’s at work, then it’s time for school! I can’t blame them, really, because school is coloring books and board games and field trips and penguin worksheets and jigsaw puzzles, and wouldn’t you be stoked about that? However, it IS summer, and I’ve kind of given myself permission to skip a day. Then another day. Then another day. And so I started to feel guilty and began planning a big ‘school’ project for the boys. I was actually working on it this morning when Charlie came up to me and said, “You know, mommy, we haven’t done school in like…weeks!” (More guilt! Haha.)

The idea for this came from Tommy and Teddy, actually, who have started to take a real interest in fairy tales. I noticed that as I was telling them stories, Max and Charlie would sneak over from whatever very serious Hot Wheels superhero adventure mystery they were acting out to listen to the end of ‘The Three Little Pigs.’ Some things just don’t get old.

So what I did was write out a fairy tale – Goldilocks and the Three Bears, in this case – and break it up into chunks with an activity on each page.

The completed packet is 11 pages and kept Max and Charlie happily occupied for a solid hour. I printed a couple extra copies of the last page and Tommy and Teddy spent the hour gleefully cutting it into tiny pieces and gluing them to another page. To do this you need paper, pencils, crayons, scissors, and glue sticks. That’s it.

Activities include:

• Cutting
• Pasting
• Connect the dots
• Coloring
• Drawing
• Writing
• Sorting
• Matching

and, of course,

• Reading

The title page has boxes for writing the capitals Handwriting Without Tears style since that’s the program we’re using. Also, two kids each had one hour of fun doing this, but since it actually took me more than two hours to draw it and put it together (how do you like the original artwork? heehee) it would make me feel better about my use of time if at least one other child had a fun time with this packet. Click here to download the entire packet!

Other activities we did include a dramatic reenactment of Goldilocks and the Three Bears (the kids LOVED that) and having “porridge” (oatmeal with some molasses in it, for color) as lunch. Also, Charlie gave me a big hug and told me that I’m “a fun mom.” Awww.