End of the Year Writing Celebration...Fairy Tale Ball!

End of the Year Writing Celebration....Fairy Tale Ball! 

Fairy Tale Ball Tablescape
At the end of the year, our first graders get to pick a fairy tale to retell from beginning to end. They use all the writing skills that they have learned from the whole year. They use nice handwriting, beautiful illustrations,  great sentences, lots of adjectives and dialogue. We work very hard in May to take this story through the writing process to publish this book. This is the story they will be reading at our Fairy Tale Ball.  I've made fairy tale writing templates for our students to use for this. 

The students use these templates for Brainstorming, First Draft, Student Conference, Proofreading, Teacher Conference, Editing and Revision, Final Draft, and Publishing. They have a blast retelling their favorite fairy tale and getting to illustrate their pictures. 

We discuss all the story elements for a fairy tale and what it usually has that makes so special. We use this anchor chart: 

We discuss the three main authors of Fairy Tales and what country they were from: Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen and The Grimm Brothers. We use this poster to help us decide which fairy tale we want to write about: 

We also use these story element cards to mix the magic! 

We cut up the cards, and put them in a mixing bowl while we are discussing the story elements, and use a magic wand...the students LOVE this! 

On the day of the Fairy Tale Ball, each student brings a food that goes along with their story. So, if they wrote about Rapunzel, they bring radishes. If they wrote about Snow White, they bring apples slices.... catch on? They bring a basket to put their food in for our tablescape. I also have one parent make a castle cake for us to enjoy. Here are some examples of cakes I've had in the past: 

On the day of the Fairy Tale Ball, they get to dress up like their character from their story. They get to read their story to the parents and then the parents write them a compliment in the back of their book. The students love this! Here are some of our characters from our Ball with their published story. Can you see the gold sticker on the cover? 

The Snow Queen 

Beauty and the Beast

The Gingerbread Man 
The students had a blast at our Fairy Tale Ball. Maybe next year you'd like to have a fairy tale ball too? If you are interested in checking our my fairy tale writing resource click here:Once Upon a Time...A Fairy Tale Writing Unit

I hope you live Happily Ever After! 
Love, Kara