After reading the fable out loud, Scholastic Professional Books suggests having students dramatize the story. This can help them become familiar with the events prior to class discussion. Students can work in groups to produce their own adaptation of the story, having one person play the narrator and rest of the group playing the characters. They can also make props out of everyday objects and craft supplies to enhance the performance. They can then perform their fable adaptation for the class as a lead-in to talking about its moral.
Metaphors, indirect comparisons between two seemingly different things, are a key component of fables. You can pass out copies of the fable for the day and have students use highlighters to mark the major characters, setting and objects. They can then work together to find the moral by determining what each metaphor represents. In the fable "The Fox and the Stork," where a fox invites a stork to dinner and gives him soup in a bowl that doesn't fit his long beak, the fox can be seen as a metaphor for trickery and dishonesty.
Because the ultimate goal of fables is for students to grasp their meanings, teachers should lead students to understand how the stories are relevant to their experiences. Once students have determined the moral of a fable, you can ask them to share stories of times when they were in the characters' positions. For example, if they are reading "The Tortoise and the Hare," you can ask if anyone has ever been successful by taking their time with a task. Students can then draw pictures of their experiences and write a brief description of what happened.
Once students understand the genre's elements, they can practice by writing their own fables. You can pass around a bag with different morals written on pieces of paper, such as, "You can't judge a book by its cover" and "Pride leads to a fall." Students can then randomly choose a moral and decide on their characters, a setting and a problem that needs to be solved. After students go through the writing and revision process, you can publish a class fable collection that includes everyone's work.