Aesop’s Fables Homeschool Lesson

In this short Aesop’s Fables homeschool lesson, I will share some resources, note-pages, fable rewrites and an even shorter play rewrite!

Aesop’s fables offer life lessons on perseverance (e.g., “The Crow and the Pitcher”), preparing for the future (e.g., “The Ant and the Grasshopper”), and being content with what you have (e.g., “The Dog and the Shadow”). The core lesson is often found in the story’s moral, which uses animal characters to teach simple truths applicable to human behaviour and decision-making. 

Aesop’s Fables Homeschool Lesson Aesop’s Life

Aesop was an ancient Greek fabulist and storyteller, believed to have lived between 620 and 564 BCE. The details of his life are unclear and likely fictionalised. He is credited with a collection of fables known as Aesop’s Fables. These are short stories with moral lessons, often featuring anthropomorphic animals. While no original writings by him survive, the fables were collected over centuries, and he is a figure of historical mention by writers like Herodotus.  

Life and origins

• Time and place: Lived in ancient Greece, with historians placing his life between 620 and 564 BCE.
• Historical account: The historian Herodotus mentioned “Aesop the fable writer” as a slave who lived during the 5th century BCE.
• The Aesop Romance: An ancient, probably fictional, account describes him as a slave who gained his freedom through his cleverness. He eventually became an advisor to kings.
• Physical description: Ancient accounts often depict him as a strikingly ugly slave. 

Fables and legacy

• Fables: A collection of short stories with moral lessons, often using animal characters to teach truths about human nature. 
• Purpose: The fables were important in ancient times, especially before widespread literacy, as a way to teach morality and were used in education as writing exercises. 
• Oral tradition: The stories were passed down orally for generations before being written down, and many fables predated Aesop’s time. 
• Collections: A Byzantine scholar named Maximus Planudes wrote down a collection of the fables in Greek between 1270 and 1330. 
• Modern impact: The fables continue to be retold and reinterpreted in popular and artistic media today. 

Resources

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The Life of Aesop by  Benny Thomas  

Biographies on Aesop are hard to come by so this is consequently considered to be a fictionalised biography.

Aesop’s Fables Hardcover: The Classic Edition by acclaimed illustrator, Charles Santore

Charles Santore’s Aesop’s Fables is a beautiful, classic collection with both enchanting illustrations and rewrites of 147 of Aesop’s timeless tales. This is generally a visually appealing book of moral lessons for children and adults alike although the stories are short. In fact, this is a perfect read just before bed due to the short length of the fables

Aesop – The Complete Fables  by  Aesop  (Author, Robert Temple

This edition of Aesop’s fables is a fully annotated modern version, with an excellent translation, but criticised for the lack of an index or table of contents. It’s recommended for its comprehensive collection and insightful, witty content, but less so for those who need to quickly find specific fables.  Conversely, its lack of an index or table of contents, makes it difficult to find specific fables without reading through all 358 stories. All things considered, this is a a definitive and fully annotated edition. It features an excellent translation that reveals the humour, insight, and savage wit of the fables, including fascinating glimpses into everyday ancient Greek life, with each fable providing a moral or warning.

Life Lessons from Aesop’s Fables

Perseverance and Problem-Solving

• The Crow and the Pitcher:
  • Pros: Highlights how persistence can lead to success
  • Cons: The solution requires multiple, deliberate actions.
• The Tortoise and the Hare:
  • Pros: Teaches that slow, steady, and consistent effort can win over overconfidence and complacency
  • Cons: It’s a story, not a direct manual for a specific problem.

Preparedness and Future-Thinking

• The Ant and the Grasshopper:
  • Pros: Emphasizes the importance of hard work and saving for the future; Twinklnotes the lesson is to “Work hard and play hard, but always be prepared.”
  • Cons: Doesn’t account for the joy of living in the moment.
• The Lion and the Mouse:
  • Pros: Shows that even the small and weak can help the strong, and kindness can be repaid.
  • Cons: The act of kindness is not always a guarantee of future help.

Social and emotional intelligence

• The Dog and the Shadow:
  • Pros: Teaches the value of contentment and not being greedy for more than you have; Twinkl summarizes the moral as “Be happy with what you have and don’t be greedy.” 
  • Cons: The story is simple and doesn’t go into depth about why the dog is greedy.
• The Fox and the Grapes:
  • Pros: Illustrates how people can pretend to dislike something they cannot have, which is the origin of the phrase “sour grapes”; Study.com notes this is a lesson “that sometimes there are those who pretend to have disdain for something once they realize that what they wanted is something that they cannot have.” 
  • Cons: It portrays a negative human behavior that may not be universally applicable.

Aesop’s Fables Homeschool Lesson: Activities

Note Page on Aesop’s Life

First, I had the children make up a quick note page about Aesop.  Given how little we know about him, it really was quick:

Aesop Fable Rewrite

My goal when learning about Aesop and his infamous fables was to utilise their simplicity and teach the children how to spin a good yarn!  The IEW curriculum (which we used briefly at that time) taught this really well.  First the children had to rewrite the fables in their own words. And then when they were proficient at doing that, they substituted different characters or settings into the story.  The essence of the fable remained the same but the children were able to play around with details.  This allowed my early writers the confidence of having a story in front of them, with the creativity to recreate something slightly different. 

It worked well for us and the children rewrote copious amounts of these stories.  For examples of stories when they changed the characters or played around with the story line, see my Ancient China post.  I am sharing the simple rewrite here, the ones I enjoyed the most from each child:

The Tortoise and the Hare Play

Together we rewrote one of the most well known fables and turned it into a play, which the children then acted out for us: The Tortoise and the Hare.  I’m sharing the play here, but I am unable to find any photos of the play being acted out, costumes and all!  I know I took some, but am so disorganised that I seem to have mislaid them somewhere in the vortex that is my home!  Here is the play:

And that was that.