The skinny: We did this program as a book club program for Kindergarten-5th grade. These fairy tale/STEM/Book Club programs were born out of a mission of mine to incorporate more literacy into our STEM programming. What better way to do that than read a great fairy tale, incorporate literacy vocabulary by talking about the characters and what the problem was in the book, and then engineering our way to a better solution?

Supplies needed: Copy paper, markers, The Little Red Hen by Paul Galdone.

Time: Plan about 30 minutes for this program. counting the time to get the kids their snack, read the book, and do the activity. So, if you are looking for a 30 minute program, this is a good one. If you need to stretch your time a little more, then try adding a closing game at the end. That is something that I hope to do next time.

How it went:  These programs welcome kids in Kindergarten-fifth grade, and the younger kids really do well. The older kids tend to get bored, so I try to verbally give them additional challenges to make the STEM activity harder. It just depends on the age of your group.

I did this program as part of a thematic series using our Cookies and Milk Book Club as the weekly program to draw kids in. We hold this on Tuesdays at 3:45 pm. To prep, I buy a half gallon of milk and a value sized bag of Cookie Crunch cereal. I never know how many kids will come so when they arrive I pour the milk and cookies after the kids have arrived and while chatting with them about anything they think is important. Once they have their afterschool snack, I introduced our book, The Little Red Hen by Paul Galdone.

Everyone already knows this story, but they enjoy eating their snack and following along. It seems that even older kids really like storytime, they just don’t want to admit it. To make it more interactive, though, I do invite the kids to repeat phrases with me such as, “Not I, said the cat” and other sound effects like the sound of the Little Red Hen scratching in the dirt to plant her seeds.

After reading the story we talked about the problems the Little Red Hen faced in this book. It is really fun to hear kids reactions of how angry they can get with the Little Red Hen’s friends who are not helping out! I talked to the kids about a “Help Wanted” poster, and it can be used to help advertise when a person wants to hire someone for a job. We talked about how great it would be if the Little Red Hen was able to make a poster to get some help with all her work!

I invited the kids to create their own “Help Wanted” poster. For the younger kids we talked about what chores the Little Red Hen might need help with: planting seeds, watering seeds, bring the wheat to market, baking the bread, etc. They also drew pictures. Now, we just had a problem with how to send the posters. So, we decided to fold them into paper airplanes and fly them around the room, which we did.

Have you done Fairy Tale STEM in your library? I would love to hear your ideas!