Fables

Continuing the theme from their shadow puppet theatre, and referring to the NC for Year 3, I decided to move on to looking at fables in more detail as our next Literacy topic.

We read examples from some of the books in this collection (I bought a few many years ago for £1 each from The Works!) and I left the others in their book box for this term for them to explore at their leisure.

We talked briefly about who Aesop was - where and when he was from - but I plan to go through this in more detail in the coming weeks as we move on to look at Greek mythology InshaAllah.

Another day, we read through some more examples of fables and I left several books open as visual reminders. We discussed what they all had in common - i.e. how do we know they're fables? What features do they have?

As the girls came up with ideas, and I prompted for others, we came up with a list of features:

- Short and simple
- Only a few characters, usually 2
- Often animal characters
- One learns a lesson
- The characters are in the title
- Contains direct speech
- Contains time connectives
- Contains connectives to show cause and effect
- The moral is written at the end

The following day, I printed out the following sheet as a template for the girls to have a go at planning and writing their own short fable.

You can download the worksheet here.

Because we had just covered Al-Mutakabbir as one of Allah's names, I gave the girls the moral "Don't be arrogant".

We discussed ideas together as a group and they each came up with their own plot. They wrote their first draft, listened to each other's to give constructive criticism, edited their work then wrote up their final drafts below: