Jack and The Beanstalk

I've been trying to find an excellent, but not too long, version of Jack and the Beanstalk to share with my book club this afternoon. This month we read Foolish Jack and the Bean Stack by Laurence Anholt. The cupcakes have been baked. (I put jelly beans in the bottom of the paper cups, so they'd be magic bean cupcakes.) All other plans are finalized, though it's become a pretty much fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants event, but in a good way. Now all I need is a good version of the story. Oh, and an icebreaker.

The group is becoming a little more static, but I always have new kids. Even if I had the same group every month I think I'd still do some kind of icebreaker activity. It helps with the taking of turns, and of course loosening everyone up a bit.*

Anyway, back to the book. I considered having the kids listen to the story on the cd that's included with The Jack Tales by Ray Hicks. However, I had a hard enough time focusing on it that I don't want to count on the kids being able to follow the heavily accented round about telling. (I checked the Digital Library of Appalachia, a great resource, for a different telling, to no avail.)

So do I tell read the tale in my southern accent? I guess that'll depend on the version that I choose. I'm thinking we'll talk a little bit about the lifespan of the story so far, and how people have different things with it. This will be the most cerebral activity we've done, by far. I'll let ya'll know how it goes.

*I'd love suggestions for icebreaker activities for 1-3 graders. I'm running out of ideas.