Story 2.Rapunzel

Students must read the classic short story about Rapunzel through the following link.
http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/Rapu.shtml


PRE-TEACHING ACTIVITIES.

Show the students a short video of Rapunzel's story before going on an in-depth analysis just to get familiarized with the main character. Then discuss some of the main points of the story.

ACTUAL-TEACHING.

Act 1. Regular and irregular VERBS.

Since the story is crammed with past tense structures, the students will be asked to gather all the words that appear in the text and then classify them into the type of verb tense they belong, either regular or irregular.  For this, they will be urged to use the following website: www.wordle.com and create two word collages of each type.

Here are some examples of few words, but they need to scan the text in search for every single word it appears.



               Regular verbs                                                                                                                            Irregular verbs

Doing this the students will be practising the irregular verbs and learinng which have the ending -ed and which others don't.

POST-TEACHING

Act1. Characterizaton technique. 

The task will consist in dividing the class into groups of 5, each of them will be assigned a character at random. The story has 5 only characters, the father and the mother, the wicked witch called Dame Gothel, the king's son and Rapunzel. Each group will have simulate a speaking virtual avatar for each character using the online program www.voki.com in which  they can choose from a wide array of features, background, customs and voices in order to get an accurate appearance for each of them. They will have to create a suitable speech for each character using the regular and irregular verbs. This speech will show each character's role in first person narrator as if they were real persons.

The speech will last 3 or 4 minutes and the content should be like a character self-introduction, each character will describe the situation from its point view, telling what has happened to them and how they managed to get through problems (if they did so). Additionally, the customizing of the character should be precise, since the voki program provides a highly flexible characterization and allows adding personal images from your PC as backgrounds ,the more the character depicts its role, the higher mark the group will get.

Here are some samples of my own avatars for each character, choosing personal landscapes as backgrounds according to each role.

                  Wicked Witch                                 Rapunzel                                           Prince

                                  Rapunzel's Dad                                           Rapunzel's Mum





Act.2 Comparision discussion

Ask your students if they have ever seen the Disney movie Tangled, if not, then have a try! it just lasts an hour and a half and its really enjoying and adventurous. You can dedicate two lessons to watch this movie in the english class and then afterwards go on comparing the two stories by asking them questions about differencies between classic Rapunzel and Disney's production.

Possible questions:

¿ Do Rapunzel parents agreed with the old witch to

 give her full custody of the newborn in Tangled?

Was, also, a rampion what Rapunzel's mother needed not to die in Tangled?
or a magic flower? What sort of medical properties did it have?

Did Rapunzel in the classic story have the chance of
craving adventure with the Prince for a day?

Why was the witch in Tangled so fond of Rapunzel's
long blondie mane?

Did Rapunzel get  frightened out when the prince
first burst into the tower in both versions of the story?

Who really cut Rapunzel's lovely golden braids in Tangled, actually?
Did it turn into a darker color in Classic Rapunzel as well?