H C Andersen unit study

During our trip to Denmark recently we went on a field trip at a sand sculpture "festival". Local and foreign artists had made sand sculptures of famous Danish fairy tales and folklore. A couple of them depicted scenes from famous stories by H. C. Andersen.

B and I talked about reading up on a few of the most famous stories of H. C. Andersen and do a little unit study of him. Our goal is to do quite a few unit studies of all sorts of topics this year. This is our first one of the year. B just started 6th grade.

I am thinking our unit studies will run for one week at a time doing a little each day, but we will see. This one is about a weeks worth of material spending around an hour or two each day.

We did a quick consult of Wikpedia as always.

We read this bullet point time line of his life. This is a short biography.

I made a list of his most famous fairy tales, which we read in Danish in a big book B got at his name giving party when he was a baby.

You can also read them here in English, I have linked them up.

The Tinder-box - and as an animation.
The Ugly Duckling
The Princess and the Pea
The Emperor's New Clothes
The Little Match Girl

He wrote many more and also many more well known ones, but we decided on this list of 5 for this unit study. Here is a chronological list of all his fairy tales.

We watched the movie H.C. Andersen - My life as a fairy tale. I found it on YouTube in several parts. Trailer.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10

Last year we watched Hans Christian Andersen - with Danny Kaye. Not terribly accurate, but it gave a nice flavor and I am a big fan of Danny Kaye, so there is that. Trailer. They showed it on TV. I couldn't find it on YouTube except for a few parts.

And just because The Red Shoes is live streaming on our Netflix account, we saw that too.

We also tied this in with some geography to locate where he lived and traveled.

This was really great for 6th grade level, and I can see us circling back to this in 7th or 8th grade and dive into story analysis in even greater detail, adding on a few fairy tales and maybe some poems too.

Like this one:

“To move, to breathe, to fly, to float,
To gain all while you give,
To roam the roads of lands remote,
To travel is to live.”
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