Fractured Fairy Tales For Student Actors

A variety of fairy tale and fantasy spoofs in two sections: short 5-minute scenes for two or three actors and longer 10-minute scenes for six to twenty actors.

Common Core State Standards for Grade 6: Language Arts Instructional Strategies and Activities is designed to help teachers address Common Core standards using research-based, effective instructional strategies in combination with ready-to-use activities. These strategies include identifying similarities and differences, writing summaries and taking notes, creating non-linguistic representations, and suggestions for homework and practice. There are a variety of suggested texts as well as identified text exemplars that can easily be used with the strategies and activities.

Children will thoroughly enjoy making and playing with the range of well-known fairy tale scenes and characters provided in this colorful book, including Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Sleeping Beauty, Rumpelstiltskin, Tom Thumb, Rapunzel, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Scenes are made from a range of easy-to-find natural materials, including wool, felt, and cotton, and are great fun to make. This book contains all the necessary patterns and instructions and is clearly illustrated with diagrams and photographs. The scenes are organized according to season, so the story can be matched to the appropriate time of year.

It wasn’t so long ago that the fairy tale was comfortably settled as an established and respectable part of children’s literature. Since the fairy tale has always been a mirror of its times, however, we should not be surprised that in the latter part of the twentieth century it turned dark and ambiguous; its categorical distinction between good and evil was increasingly at odds with the times. Yet whatever changes the fairy tale may have undergone, its cultural popularity has never been greater. Fairy Tales in Popular Culture sets out to show how the tale has been adapted to meet the needs of the contemporary world; how writers, film-makers, artists, and other communicators have found in its universality an ideal vehicle for speaking to the here-and-now; and how social media have created a participatory culture that has re-invented the fairy tale. A selection of recent retellings show how the tale is being recalibrated for the contemporary world, first through the word and then through the image. In addition to the introductions that precede each section, the anthology provides a selection of critical pieces that offer lively insight into various aspects of the fairy tale as popular culture.

Meet the incompetent dragon and the princess who doesn't marry the prince! The princess is tired of rescuing princes, but agrees to go the aid of a prince who has been captured by a dragon. She finds that the dragon is required by the Department of Dragons Rules and Regulations to present her with three impossible tasks, which she does in her own way, in spite of the dragon's complaints. In this humorous departure from traditional "helpless princess" tales, the authoritative princess of color and the irritable dragon figure out how to work together to solve problems while finding each other annoying. In an unlikely partnership they deal first with the captured prince, then with issues of air pollution and a war, even though the princess is impatient and the dragon is not particularly competent.

Who better to wreak havoc with eight beloved fairytales than Gregory Maguire, the brilliantly funny author of the adult novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, as well as of the hilarious middle–grade series, The Hamlet Chronicles. Zany animals of all species run through these fractured tales with alarming speed and dexterity. Who would have thought that Sleeping Beauty, that most regal of all fairy– tales, could be twisted into the story of a frog with a most unusual and promising dance career? Get ready to meet a gorilla queen and a psycho chimp, seven giant giraffes; and one very bad walrus.

Over the summer in New York City, seven friars who work with the homeless find a runaway girl named Nora, while Bear Denniston searches for his missing girlfriend, Blanche, in a suspenseful retelling of the Snow White story.