From Sleeping Beaty to Pretty Woman...Mirror, mirror on the wall, do you get the point at all?

An Integrated, Interdisciplinary, Thematic Unit on Fairy Tales. "Once Upon a Time, fairy tales weren't written simply to entertain young childrenà" These stories of wonder and enchantment are far older than the versions that we read today. Fairy tales were magical stories and folk tales that were told and retold from generation to generation, a vehicle for passing on important lessons of life. Long after the invention of the printing press, these tales became popular in their written forms (17th-century France - Charles Perrault, later in Germany when collected and recorded by the Grimm brothers). The intended audience and inherent purpose changed, but these tales were important as a literary genre and as a window to life in the Middle Ages. The essential concepts of this unit are: the importance of Perrault and the Grimm brothers in recording oral European folktales, the characteristics and purpose of a fairy tale as a literary genre, the fairy tale as a reflection of life in the