Folktales around the world include similar story elements in their construction. According to folklorist Vladimir Propp, folktales include such traditional elements as a soft opening (“Once upon a time”), repetition of an offending behavior (Goldilocks’ repeatedly using the bears’ things) and a final confrontation that generates the tale’s lesson (the townsfolk confronting the boy for crying wolf). When teaching folktales, you can have students identify these elements in each folktale.
According to folklorist William Bascom, different folktales reflect the different cultures from which they emerge. For example, “Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears” reflects pastoral living and natural nuisances on a savanna in central Africa. Similarly, “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” reflects the challenges of shepherding in the mountains of Greece. When students engage an individual folktale, teachers can ask them to reflect upon the various cultural markers in each folktale, and how those markers might change if the setting of the story changed.
Folktales nearly always present some underlying moral or lesson. Indeed, according to Propp, this was a primary and original function of many folktales: to teach young people important life lessons through an entertaining story. For younger classes, simply identifying and reflecting upon a folktale’s lesson can be a valuable learning experience. For older classes, analyzing and evaluating the lesson and its limitations can provide an engaging thought exercise.
According to Hans-Jorg Uther, editor of “The Types of International Folktales," different cultures share similar folktales, even though these cultures seem to have not had much interaction with each other throughout history. In fact, different folktales are categorized according to their similarities using something called the Aarne and Thompson system of numbering. When teaching folktales, students can use the AT system to locate similarly themed folktales from different cultures and then compare and contrast the different tales’ similarities and differences.