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RECYCLED ELVES: FAIRY TALE DO-OVERSby Lucas Gonzalez and Chris Molnar

sessions, hours each

We’ve heard the same old fairy tales for too long! What about the original version of the story, before it was changed, when Little Red Riding Hood gets eaten by the Wolf? And what if the Wolf’s belly actually turned out to be a portal into an alternate universe, where you are a talking recycling bin who drives a Mister Softee truck?

When we found ourselves at 826NYC as interns in the fall of 2010, director Joan Kim was eager to give us the opportunity to work with the young writers who fi nd inspiration in the writing lab behind the swinging shelf of 826’s Superhero Supply Co. As we fl ipped through the pages of a past edition of 826 National’s writing workshop manual, we came across one lesson plan that we thought would be perfect for the young learners we had been working with: writing your own fairy tales. Th is format (that of the fantastical precautionary tale with a moral bent), would be a perfect vehicle for the imagination of our young writers. Our hope was that this workshop would open the door to some fun, wild, strange, and inventive stories by reimagining fairy tales, recy-cling their format, and learning how such stories have evolved over many centuries.

Our journey began with a discussion of some familiar quirks and tropes: the vital elements to fairy tales. So we started by asking our students

about some fairy tales they knew. We talked heroes, we talked villains, we talked pigs, fair-ies, wolves, and we talked elves. We knew we needed to have a mission, and we knew that mission needed to be interrupted by some sort of dilemma: monsters, aliens, or what would even-tually turn out to be a trio of evil space dictators in one student’s story. Whoever he or she or it would be, our hero would need to fi nd his way out of this situation and teach us all a lesson. But, as we learned in our workshop, fairy tales haven’t always had happy endings!

Staying mindful of kids’ attachment and long relationship to the versions of modern fairy tales, we began to discuss famous fairy tales as they once existed in a primitive form, stories that are not without their sense of shock value to the wholesome and Disneyfi ed tales we are used to.

little red riding hoodIn the original version of this story, there is no Grandma! Th ere is no valiant woods-man who saves LRRH from the belly of the wolf! Th ere is only a little girl with a riding cape and deceitful wolf with a full belly.

snow whiteTh e witch wants the heroine’s liver and lungs! Th at’s right! For dinner! No magical

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Recycled Elves: Fairy Tale Do-Overs 37

kiss here, either, sadly. Just a righteous downfall for the evil witch . . . the broth-ers Grimm condemn her to dance to death in red-hot iron shoes.

goldilocks and the three bearsWe all know this heartwarming tale about a pretty little girl who stumbles into the abode of the three bears. Th ere are pur-portedly two version of the original tale. In the fi rst, Goldilocks, upon realizing that the bears are returning, jumps out the window, breaks either her legs or her neck, and is sent to prison for trespassing. In the second version, the story is all too short! Upon the bears’ arrival home, our little heroine is immediately devoured.

Th e list, as you will fi nd from some research on the web, goes on and on! Fairy tales have never seemed more strange as they do now, when we can look back on their evolution over time and see how diff erent stories send the same mes-sage in a very diff erent way. Th e enslavement of children, the threat of man-eating beasts, and the deeds of wicked witches and demons have never seemed so tame as they have today!

Leave it up to the students to decide what kind of tale they want to tell. Th e only goal is to tell a story that serves as a spellbinding tale of caution! Th e characters are theirs to shape. Th e elements of the plot, the twists and turns, are theirs to shuffl e and reinvent. Let’s recycle some old stories and begin creating the next generation of fairy tales and whimsical warnings.

One way we decided to start writing was by doing a fairy tale together, Mad-Lib style (next page).

Working through these Mad-Libs will give students an idea of the format they can take on. It will give students a chance to get warmed up, talk about some characters, some elements of the stories, and open up the possibilities of their own tales.

In the fi rst session, we did the intro just described and got started with our stories. In our second workshop, we fi nished the stories and took some time to illustrate them with col-lages and drawings. Th e workshop concluded with some amazing storytelling, with our writers reading their new fairy tales to an audience of parents and staff !

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Copyright ©

2011 by 826 National

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