"When you learn to read you will be born again...and you will never be quite so alone again." -Rumer Godden

When you hear the genre Fantasy Fiction, you immediately think you know everything about that topic. I can honestly say, once upon a time I was one of those people. Then I researched the topic and it was eye opening the amount of new information I was learning. 

From left to right
Alicia, Lindsay, Megan

For example, there are two sub-genres of Fantastical Literature and they are fantasy and science fiction. At first I didn't realize the two were connected, but now I will never make that mistake again. There is also a such thing as high fantasy and low fantasy as well as hard science fiction and soft science fiction. It was mind boggling learning about these different categories and all of a sudden the genre fantastical started to make more sense to me.

Materials to help during the game

 If you would like to learn more information about the Fantastical genre then please take a look at our Fantasy Power Point. A big thank you to Alicia for putting this powerpoint together!

Our group of three was asked to present our topic, Fantasy, to the class as if we were leading a professional development. First we started our session by asking our class to fill out a KWL chart. We lead a discussion about what they already knew, and then went through the powerpoint because whether we like it or not, fantasy fiction is not common knowledge. 

Devon had Peter Pan

Kait had Katniss Everdeen

Then we played a couple of rounds of Fantasy Pictionary! The class was split up into groups of 2 or 3 and given a fantastical character or book on a piece of paper. Then one person from the group was asked to look at their paper, and draw that character or book on another piece of paper in a one minute time frame. For the most part, every individual in our class succeeded, so kudos to you!
Some examples were: Catching Fire, The Wizard of Oz, Mary Poppins, Peter Pan, and Jumanji (that was a tough one!)

Fantasy Land!

Desiree looks through
the book and decides
the sub-genre

Then we asked everyone in the class to travel to the back of the classroom. Here, we set up a game of Fantasy Land (Inspiration-Candy land)! It was a board game and everyone was given one turn to show off their new fantastical skills. The first person to try the game was Desiree, thank you for being brave!! When it was your turn, you were given a pair of blue sparkling fairy wings to wear. Then everyone was given a book, a color, and a question. The color and the question were two separate cards. An example of a question is as follows: What is the sub-genre? Explain how you know it is that sub-genre through the plot. The book the student was given was Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. The answers we were looking for were Fantasy Fiction and we know it is fantasy fiction because the plot is Magically Driven. The 6 posters that are pictured above were resources for our classmates to answer the questions(this was very helpful).  

Denise answers correctly!

The winner of the game was a little bit rigged due to time constraints, but if you were lucky enough to get a double color on your color card that meant you could jump two times ahead of everyone else. There were only three of those particular cards in the deck, therefore the final came down to three people and one book left to identify. The three were lined up (no wings this time) in front of everyone else in the class. The directions went as follows: I will say one book and the first person to guess the sub-genre correctly wins. 

Trina, our Fantasy
Land Winner!

Then I said,"1, 2, 3... Mary Poppins. Trina followed by Victoria guessed Fantasy Fiction and they were correct, however there can only be one winner so the first one to say Fantasy Fiction was Trina and she was declared the Winner of Fantasy Land!
Doesn't everyone look fantastic in their wings! A big round of applause to our class for being absolutely wonderful troopers the entire time!

To finish off our presentation, we spoke about 5 different books that we would recommend to our class. Megan spoke about Where the Wild Things Are and Mary Poppins. Then I spoke about, The Polar Express, Alice in Wonderland, and The Summer King.
We also recommended Tuck Everlasting and the author of the book, Natalie Babbitt. We also recommended the author, Chris Van Allsburg. He writes beautiful books such as the Polar Express, Jumanji, and The Widow's Broom. All enchanting books!

Thank you to Dr. Smirnova and Nicole for the pictures!