How to Use Fairy Tales to Build Language and Writing Skills in Early Learners

Through the art of storytelling, beginning readers develop listening, speaking, and vocabulary skills, all of which help to lay the foundation for early reading success. Fairy tales are a powerful storytelling tradition that use a shared common language to teach lessons and develop children’s imaginations.

Early childhood educator Sandra Carrillo loves using fairy tales in the classroom to build her young students’ oral language and comprehension skills. She has found that “a fairy tale like The Three Little Pigs provides an excellent opportunity for children to engage with the story through predictable text, as well as providing a good model for fluent and expressive reading.” 

Read on for Carrillo’s ideas on how to use The Three Little Pigs — or any other fairy tale — to maximize learning and engagement.

Write a Letter to a Favorite Character

In this shared writing activity, your students will respond to a fairy tale you read together as a class by writing a letter to a character from the story. Ask your students to think critically about something that happened in the story. Is there anything that they want to know more about? 

Here’s how the shared writing exercise might play out after reading The Three Little Pigs:

• Say, "Everyone, let's write the first little pig a letter and tell him what we think about how he built his house of straw."  

• Think out loud as you say, "When we write a letter to someone, we begin with 'Dear,' so I will write 'Dear Little Pig' at the top of the page." 

• Ask, "What would you like to say to the little pig?"

• Continue to elicit responses while asking questions like, "What do I need to put at the end of the sentence?", etc.

• When you are finished, re-read the letter to the children. Address the letter on a large envelope to "mail." 

This type of book extension activity helps students increase their comprehension and create a personal connection to the story. You can extend the activity further by crafting a response from the character and mailing it back to your classroom in a large envelope. This will build more excitement and encourage your students to keep writing. 

Build Oral Language Through Retelling

Retelling fairy tales is an effective method of building oral language while allowing children to practice comprehension skills. There are a variety of ways to encourage students to retell the stories you read together, including using story props such as puppets, costumes, masks, a flannel board, materials to build the setting, a copy of the book, pictures of the main characters, and sequencing cards of the main events. 

Shop more fairy tales below that you can read over and over again! You can find all books and activities at The Teacher Store.