SurLaLune Fairy Tales: Annotated Fairy Tales, Fairy Tale Books, and Illustrations

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• Learn more about fairy tales, folklore, illustrations, language arts, literature, and reading.

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SurLaLune offers full text versions of many classic fairy tales. Hyperlinked annotations are embedded in the text, and supplementary pages provide resources to enhance instruction and knowledge of the basic fairy tale. One such page concerns the history of the fairy tale, giving insight into how it has progressed and evolved over time. Other pages show various illustrations of the fairy tales, provide bibliographies of similar tales from cultures around the world, and provide bibliographies of modern interpretations of the classic fairy tales. The site’s bookstore offers recommendations on current fairy tale themed books, and there is also a section of helpful links to other sites on the web dealing with fairy tales and folklore. Most of the academic materials on this site are suitable for high school level students, but many areas of the site are useful for elementary and middle school levels.

Listed below are a few ways to use this site with students across a range of grade levels.

• Use the illustrations for one or more fairy tales to discuss personal interpretations of literature. How does the artist’s representation of the fairy tale compare/contrast to students’ own imaginings of the story?
• Use the pages on similar tales across cultures as a resource for disucssing global themes and archetypes in literature, particularly in folklore. Compare and contrast similar tales from around the world as a way to explore multicultural literature.
• Use the modern interpretation pages to find potential new resources for the classroom or to recommend to students for personal reading. Students who enjoy fairy tales and folklore may also love reading modern re-tellings of the stories.