Once upon a time there was a fabulous group of third grade students. They were a special group of students. They amazed their English teachers with their wit and intelligence, but the thing that made them most special of all was their ability to transform themselves into fairytale characters.
On 15 and 17 of March, SEV third grade students performed their “Once Upon a Time…” English performance. Our evening performances included two fairytale stories adapted for the stage by teachers Catherine Riedesel and Anne Stuart Günay – ‘The Bremen Town Musicians’ and ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin,’ with music chosen and arranged by Burçak Çapkan.
This performance came at the end of our fairytale unit. During this unit of study, students met three distinct curricular goals: First, they read three different fairy tales to compare and contrast, and identified the story elements of each story. Second, we studied the present simple tense in grammar. Third, they applied their learning of the story elements, fairytale framework, and the writing process fractured fairy tales of their own using the online program StoryJumper.
The grand culmination of all of this work was to perform two fairy tales on stage. It was thrilling to see students on stage acting their parts so well. Both plays had many humorous moments in them and the students had fun acting out their roles to bring the humour to life for the audience. There was an angry woman who wanted to turn her rooster to soup. There were robbers that were frightened off by animals they thought were ghosts. There were townspeople who saw rats in their beds and on their heads. And there was a Pied Piper who stole away children to teach a greedy mayor a lesson.
The music chosen for these plays also lent a special touch and highlighted the tales’ lessons of friendship and honesty. We used contemporay music such as ‘Count On Me’ by Bruno Mars and lyrics written especially for ‘the Imperial March’ from Star Wars. Students enjoyed bringing songs they were already familiar with into these shows. In the closing song, the audience was also able to sing along to the familiar song ‘Lean On Me’ making the end of our show very memorable indeed.