Once Upon a Time: Writing Your Own Fairy Tale

Loewen, N., & Lyles, C. (2009). Once upon a time: writing your own fairy tale. Minneapolis, MN: Picture Window Books.

Summary: Ready to build a fairy tale? First, you’ll need the right tools. Open this title in the Writer’s Toolbox series and discover plenty of tips and tools to get you started. Soon you’ll be writing magical adventures like a pro!

Retrieved from: Amazon.com on November 25, 2019: https://www.amazon.com/Once-Upon-Time-Writing-Writers/dp/1404853367/ref=sr_1_1?crid=13GATCBHST5PE&keywords=once+upon+a+time+writing+your+own+fairy+tale&qid=1574734342&sprefix=once+upon+a+time+wr%2Caps%2C164&sr=8-1

Age level appropriate for this book: Grades 3-4

Justification: This adorable book would be great for use with the standard RL.3.5 (Describe and provide evidence for how parts of the text contribute to the overall structure of poems, stories and dramas, including but not limited to linear, non-linear and circular structures.) After looking at poems and stories in the classroom, students could become the writers. The book gives an example of a fairytale and on each page, it describes what parts a fairytale needs such as setting, character, plot, etc. This book is a good hands-on approach to allowing your students to become the author. If writing a story would be too complex for the students, it would still be a great book to use when learning about the different parts of a story.

Review: Writers need the right tools in order to build a story. In this book, Nancy Loewen explores which tools are used in writing fairy tales. She builds a list of thirteen different tools or characteristics found in common with most fairy tales. These tools include: settings, characters, plot, dialogue, warnings, magic, greed, tricks, secrets, repetition, mistakes, problem solving, and a pleasing ending. Throughout the book, the author writes part of the story of Little Red Riding Hood and pairs each section with different tools. She then writes an explanation of how the tools are used in the fairy tale.

I thought that this book was awesome! It did a great job of not only describing the different characteristics of a fairy tale, but also showing the reader how it is used by giving examples from Little Red Riding Hood.

This would be a perfect book for a fairy tale unit. I think that this would be great to not only teach the students different characteristics of fairy tales, but also this would be a great resource to help students write their own fairy tales. This book could be used to teach students how to write fairy tales which could then become a performance task.

Retrieved from Goodreads.com on November 25, 2019: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7517850-once-upon-a-time?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=XQ0UDIrMsp&rank=1