Written up for a KS3 English group, but could easily be adapted to any age group and/or film group.

Takes between 1hr 30 and 2hrs depending on how chatty/engaged your group are. You can save a bit of time getting the group to read the story before hand, but we read it together, taking each paragraph in turn.

A link for the text is in the download, but if you were wanting to look at illustration too, the Jerry Pinkney version has very pathos-heavy pictures that fit this session’s theme well.

This session predominantly focuses on pathos, but we also looked at context and genre too. I had to fill in more information about context than I needed to for genre, as they had already covered a fair bit on fairy tales in the past, but obviously how much info you need to give the students and how much they can answer for themselves is entirely group dependent.

We didn’t do many of the activities in the end, as our group does like to talk, so just looked at what sentence/section in the story grabbed everyone the most, but if you have many creative writers in you group, it is a fab story to re-write if you are focusing on literary technique.

Many were not keen on the story to begin with, but really enjoyed looking through it as a group, vocalising their disapproval of the text, breaking it down and discussing how well the adaptations do the story justice.

Happy Christmas!!!