Chapter 6: Modern Fantasy

In my house, modern fantasy is brought in all the time.  My children have read The Magic Tree House series, 39 Clues, The Tales of Despereaux, and Charlotte’s Web to name a few.  The only thing is I never knew that modern fantasy was such a broad spectrum of literature.  It is categorized into two categories: low fantasy and high fantasy.  Low fantasy in considered to take place in the real world but magical elements make them possible and high fantasy takes the information and experience from real world and projects them into another world (Johnson, 2012).

Writing modern fantasy allows the author to portray ideas to children that they might not understand otherwise.  This can be beneficial to teach subjects that are important but need a clearer understanding.

In my classroom, I will use modern fantasy as a read aloud.  During the read aloud I would stop to see what the students interpret from the authors writing.  There is always a real world connection that we want children to get.