Fairy Tales for kids

A fairy tale is a fictional story with a happy ending and the obligatory victory of good over evil. Fairy tales most often contain magic and various adventures that are incredible in everyday life. The inaccessible becomes accessible, the unreal becomes real. That is why both children and adults love to read fairy tales. Each nation has its own fairy tales with their own characteristics - national heroes, everyday life.

Fairy tales are of great importance for the development of a child, especially in preschool and primary school age. A fairy tale absorbs and preserves folk wisdom, features of national character, universal values ​​and ideals. A fairy tale is a narrative, usually folk-poetic work about fictional persons and events, mainly with the participation of magical, fantastic forces, - says the dictionary of S.I. Ozhegova.

Children's fairy tales are a necessary element of a child's upbringing, they tell him about life in an accessible language, teach, highlight the problems of good and evil, show a way out of difficult situations. Fairy tales for children are a language, for them it is more informative than the compressed, insipid adult speech. Telling and reading fairy tales, we educate the child, develop his inner world, give knowledge about the laws of life and ways to demonstrate creative ingenuity. Reading a fairy tale forms the foundations of behavior and communication in a child for life, teaches perseverance, patience, the ability to set goals and go towards them. Listening to or reading fairy tales, children accumulate in their subconscious mechanisms for solving life situations, which are activated when necessary. A fairy tale develops the creative potential, fantasy, imagination and empathy of a small person.

There are various hypotheses about the origin of the fairy tale:

1. The anthropological approach sees in the fairy tale a direct reflection of once living ideas and customs, forgotten over time and preserved as remnants.
2. The linguistic approach analyzes the evolution of the fairy tale as an oral tradition of folk art. Linguists come to the conclusion about a single source of the origin of the fairy tale and its spread in different cultures.
3. The psychoanalytic approach, tracing the fairy tale back to ancient myths, magic and dreams, attributes to it the expression of suppressed desires and complexes of man.

The fairy tale, which has entered into the life of man since ancient times, is a kind of history and a treasury of folk wisdom, as well as a universal means of conveying those ideas about the surrounding world and man himself that have developed in people in each historical era. It is well known that the earliest information about Russian fairy tales dates back to the 12th century. However, according to scientists, already in the 11th century fairy tales were included in the repertoire of ancient Russian professional dancers, songwriters, storytellers and buffoons, being the script basis of their repertoire.

Turning to the semantics of the word "fairy tale", we see that it reveals its semantic essence: a fairy tale tells about events that cannot happen in life, tells about what is hard to believe. It necessarily contains both fantasy and implausibility: animals speak with a human voice, fulfill the wishes of their heroes. Who today would believe that pancakes fall from a cloud instead of rain, or that ordinary at first glance objects turn out to be magical, i.e. capable of producing amazing actions.

A fairy tale can be: a folk tale - that is, a tale written by the people and passed from mouth to mouth for many centuries, and a literary tale - a work oriented toward fiction, closely connected with a folk tale, but, unlike it, belonging to a specific author, not having existed in oral form before publication and not having variants.

A folk tale has intra-genre varieties. In the science of fairy tales, there is a problem of classifying fairy tale genres. Thus, E. V. Pomerantseva divides folk tales into:

1. tales about animals;
2. magic tales;
3. adventure-novelistic tales;
4. everyday tales.

While V. Ya. Propp divides tales into:

1. magic tales;
2. cumulative tales;
3. tales about animals, plants, inanimate nature and objects;
4. everyday or novelistic tales;
5. fables;
6. repeatable fairy tales.

In fairy tale folklore, it is not always possible to draw a clear line between fairy tale genres.

A literary fairy tale either imitates a folk tale (a literary fairy tale written in a folk poetic style), or creates a didactic work based on non-folklore plots.