Fairy Tale Project: Rumpelstiltskin

Our first BraveWriter fairy tale project subject was Rumpelstiltskin. While I've always kind of liked this story, it turns out that The Kid does not. We therefore only read two versions:

• Rumpelstiltskin adapted and illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky
• The Girl Who Spun Gold by Virginia Hamilton, illustrated by Leo Dillon

This did give us two stories that are similar in basic narrative but very different in cultural background.  After reading them both, I asked The Kid to narrate the tale. She grumpily told me that she did not remember the story. I asked her to just start talking about anything in the story and she did give me about 8-10 completely disjointed sentences, covering the basics of the story.

So the skill we ended up focusing on this month was ordering. I took the disjointed sentences of her narrative, printed them out and cut them up - one sentence per strip. I then asked her to help me put them in order, like a puzzle. Did this event happen before or after that one? I read it out to her after she put them in order and she was satisfied with her story, which I then reordered on the computer, printed out, and she was happy to illustrate.