Teaching Folk Tales

My 7th grade students had to orally retell African folk tales for their unit project. I copied a bunch of African folk stories and gave each pair a story they had to memorize. The only thing the students couldn't do during presentation was to read from a piece of paper. The stories were very engaging and colorful and I gave the following options of presentation: 1. just retell the story, 2. act out the story, and 3. sing or play instrument while somehow telling the story.

Most students chose to act out the story, several retold the story, and 1 students actually brought a recorder to play while retelling a story about a snake. Very cool. I gave this project to my Honors students and they had a great time listening to tales from a different part of the world. It was even better because their classmates were the storytellers.

Although I used African tales, this could be done with East, South, Southeastern folk tales.

The students not only had fun learning about the content, but it promotes cultural awareness as well, which is extremely important in my classroom.

Folk Tales are truly wonderful for students of any age. I have been reading them to high school students as a reward for their good performance and conduct and they love it. The tales are always teaching something valuable in good manners, behavior, propriety, values, right and wrong.. all lessons which our students desperately need because many of them do not get them from their home environments and certainly not from television, internet or other media. My stdents love the stories because they are very simple, short, one-issue bades plots, clear and to the point. They allow for great discussions, re-telling, re-wrtiting, drawing of the story, and provide varied multi-cultural points of view relating to universa; values shared by different cultures.

Thank you very much for the lead to this website. My students, 12th graders, love stories, legends, myths, and I love to read to them... It reminds me of my childhood sitting round a fireplace with my friends and cousins listeniung to my grandmother telling stories of ancient times. I own various colletions of folktales (Italian Folktales, Japanese Tales, Ancient Myths and Legends, African Tales, Irish Tales, Russian Folktales, Railroad Tales...) My story reading is a treat top my students if they have worked to deserve it... I allow them to either write a summary of the story or draw (my students love to draw!) an event as it has affected their imagination. The event must be titled so that there is a diurect connection to the story.

Thank you for the site ... I will plan to use it.

I think like Santo, Folk tails are an aid to keep the generations connected. They have the bit of fantasy and the lot of true, in a language that is easy to remember so that the story can be retold.
Please download this free electronic book I found online. Is call Chinese Boy Chinese Girl and it compares the western stories to the Asian stories and points at similarities. At the end parents all want their kids to be good, to respect others, to stay safe.

enjoy

Patty

What a treasure the Chinese Children pdf is for my classes. Thank you, Patty. There are so many nursery rhymes here from Asia that are compared to our Mother Goose rhymes. The result, of course, is that my students have better understood that children are loved and encouraged to play word games the world over. Great resource!

I went to the link in the original post, and it has some great stuff on it. I'll easily be able to use some of this in my classes. Thanks!

These are so great! Thanks! It seems that starting with what is familiar (folk tales, childhood stories, etc.) is often a great avenue towards a more global perspective. Childhood and early stories can easily bridge the gap between cultures and help develop understanding.

Thank you for another valuable resource. I teach mythological and archetypal concepts to my 10th graders and one of the things we look at is folk tales -- how they are created, and what similarities we find to tales in the mainstream.

I've also discussed this concept with my 12th graders in World Lit, as we've researched the many Cinderella stories throughout varied cultures. I like the idea of using folk tales even more than fairy tales because the students can identify with certain aspects, or may have heard some of these tales handed down through old world parents/grandparents and the like.

I agree that teaching folk tales is a fun way to engage students in a topic-- as a 6th grade history teacher, it seems that having students analyze folk tales from each of the civilizations we have studied could be a really fun end of the year project that could help students connect back to the various civilizations we studied. Each student could have a specific civilization to study, and they could be responsible for finding a folk tale from that civilization (or the teachers could supply folk tales they could choose from) and explaining how this folk tale demonstrates certain aspects of the civilization-- students could also be responsible for summarizing key points from the civilization during the presentation.

Besides folk tales, I have used Chinese Idioms and Fable stories in my Chinese class.

These Chinese Idioms are called Chengyu (成語). Each of this Idioms consists of Four Characters. Since it only has four characters, It is very difficult to understand the meaning of it. For example: 井底之蛙 (jing di zhi wa) literally mean a frog in a well. However it has a deeper meaning than that. It implies a person with very limited outlook.

Students learn Chengyu in school as part of the Classical curriculum as well as the context. Most of the time there a story behind it for students to understand the moral.

Classroom Exercise:
a group of four students will choose one from the list of Chinese Idioms, read it, understand what the moral is, and then they need to write a play and present it to the class. The rest of the class need to write down the moral from the story.