Fairytale Picture Summary

The question I wrote on their Target Poster for Literacy this week was "Can you tell a story without words?" The twins' initial reaction was, "NO!" lol 😂

First, we looked at a picture from one of their comprehension books and talked about what they thought was happening... Who is in the picture? What are they doing? Where are they? Why? How are they feeling? What time of day is it? What might happen next? etc. etc. After we'd talked in depth about the picture, I summarised their thoughts into a story structure... "It was the afternoon and everyone had gathered in the field for a big race. Poggo and Zap were going to race around the track and everyone was there to cheer them on. Poggo's hat blew off because he was going so fast! But Zap was the winner, crossing the finish line just before Poggo. Zap was really happy he won! Poggo was upset he lost but happy for his friend." Then we talked about how we understood a whole story just from looking carefully at one picture - the picture was able to tell a story without words!

Next, we read the story of Little Red Riding Hood in storyboard format. When we were done, we talked about how this version of the fairytale was different to other versions they'd read or heard... Then we "read" through the story again, but this time just using the pictures as prompts.

Finally, we talked about how pictures can summarise a lot of words; remember how in the first picture we looked at, we were able to get a whole story out of just one picture? And when we looked at the storyboard, how many words were written underneath each picture? Then we chose a fairytale to summarise ourselves - reminding the girls of a story structure (split into three parts: beginning, middle and ending) and which were the main parts...

The girls both wanted to do The Gingerbread Man. They summarised it as:
1) Someone baked The Gingerbread Man.
2) The Gingerbread Man ran away from everyone: people and animals.
3) The Gingerbread Man was eaten by a fox.

Then they drew corresponding pictures into a pre-made template:

After they were done, I asked them to tell the story using the pictures they'd drawn. One of them ended up changing the story's ending so The Gingerbread Man wasn't eaten by the fox! I said that was fine, since fairytales can be told any way we want to... That's part of what makes them a fairytale. 😁😁

You can download our simple template here.