At WASCZ, we always strive to learn through play by providing our children with meaningful experiences and using plenty of real-life resources which enable them to make links to our day-to-day life. Our latest topic, Fairytales, is a perfect example of how we can provide children with such experiences.

Fairytales can help young children develop vital life skills in a safe environment, as they provide the opportunities to learn lessons around what is right and wrong, expectations about how to behave in society, as well as occassions to build empathy and think about others through interactions. Based on the experiences of the characters in the stories, the children can also learn that actions have consequences that can affect both others and themselves.

Learning the tale

Our first step in learning is to read a story. Our favourite one so far has been “The Three Little Pigs” and the children had the pleasure to listen to the story in a variety of ways such as reading the book, observing a puppet show, learning a song and watching an animation movie.

Hands on experience

The children explored the materials straw, wood and brick, checking how strong or sturdy they were and similarly to the three little pigs, the children worked collaboratively to make houses using these resources. This activity transported the children from the fairytale to the real world and encouraged them to think about which material would be better for a house, using questions such as “When we look outside, do we see many houses built using straw? Why do you think that is?” and “What do you think was used to build your house?”.  These questions challenge the children to become critical thinkers and problem solvers.

The children also developed their imaginative skills by using other resources in the classroom to build new homes for the pigs, such as wooden blocks, foam bricks, lego and magnetic shapes. To make sure that they were strong enough, the children took on the role of the wolf and “huffed and puffed to blow the house down”!

Retelling the story

Over the course of the week, we continued to share the “Three Little Pigs” story with the children, encouraging them to imitate the repetitive language used, and to use actions and sequence pictures to retell the tale. We also used the houses we had created using straw, wood and brick as props for our reenactment. The children had immense fun portraying the three little pigs and the wolf, using the same language as in the story as well as the elements of fear of the wolf, sadness for the destruction of the two first houses and a sense of achievement when the wolf was finally “defeated”.

Children did other activities linked to “The Three Little Pigs” such as painting a picture of the little pigs using their handprints and adding features once they were dry, as well as creating a “huff and puff picture” by blowing paint in different directions and developing their numeracy skills to practise counting and matching numbers.

The tale of "the three little pig" enchanted the children, enabled them to access a lot of experienced learning opportunities and provided them with lots of fun and laughter.