Girl Power!

First, thank you for the prayers and thoughts for my dad! All the tests came out perfectly fine yesterday. He has a follow up appointment today but everything is looking good. I really appreciate you all!

In a few hours, I'll be done with my fourth class to go towards my ESL endorsement! This term, I took Developing Cultural Awareness Through Multicultural Children's Literature. Quite a mouthful, but it was a fun class and I learned to be a LOT more critical of the books I read to and with my students. :)

As a final project, I critiqued my boxed reading series to check for cultural authenticity. It did okay, which is kind of a relief. I also had to pick out a lesson that wasn't incredibly multicultural and make it better by supplementing it!

In the first grade curriculum, there is a story in the kids' Reader called The Foolish Giant. In the story, two boys and one girl are pretending to be a giant, a knight, and a princess. In the story, the princess gets stuck in a tower and is totally dependent on the two boy characters to help her get out.

Multiculturalism absolutely includes gender, so I chose to compile a small collection of fractured fairy tales that feature strong female protagonists. Each of the stories either feature a strong female character or offer a different perspective on the typical fairy tale formula.

Here are the books I included!

And if you'd like my annotated bibliography, here it is! This is what I'm bringing as a handout to my classmates this afternoon. :)

Do you know of other fairy tales with strong female characters? I'm always looking to add to my collection!