The Fairy Tale Project: Little Red Riding Hood

August's fairy tale project was Little Red Riding Hood.

We read four versions of the story:

• Little Red Riding Hood retold by by Trina Schart Hyman
• Little Red Riding Hood retold by Anthea Bell
• Little Roja Riding Hood by Susan Middleton Elya
• Lon Po Po by Ed Young

The first two versions listed are both pretty faithful translations of the Brothers Grimm tale, each with very different, very lavish illustrations. The third is a simplified and modernized retelling with Spanish words sprinkled in. The fourth is a wonderful version of a "big bad wolf" tale originating in China.

We kept it simple this month with our focus for the writing and illustrating of the story after last month's extremely detailed retelling of Puss in Boots. We kept our discussion to talking about choosing between doing a retelling of the Brothers Grimm version, the modernized version, or the Chinese tale - how each story is different, what the similarities were, and how she could choose parts of any or all of them to weave together. In the end, she chose to do a pretty straightforward retelling of the Grimm version.