The Princess and the Pea

The Princess and the Pea

Adapted and Illustrated by Janet Stevens

Grade: 3^rd through 5^th

Have you ever dreamed that you were a real princess?  Have you ever wished that you would find your Prince Charming?  Have you ever wondered how you could become a princess and one day a queen?  In The Princess and the Pea by Janet Stevens you will see how a prince is in search of a real princess to marry and how difficult it is for him to find the one princess he will marry. 

The Princess and the Pea is a story about a prince who is in search of a princess to marry.  The prince’s mother, the queen, will not allow him to marry just any old princess.  This princess has to be a real princess.  The prince and the queen then go out across all of the land from the east to the west and the north and the south.  Through their journeys they are unable to find a real princess that matches the queens high standards to be a real princess.  They return home discouraged, sad and angry.  That night an awful thunderstorm starts and there is a knock on the castle door.  The king answers it to discover a soaked princess that is need of a place to stay.  She claims to the king that she is the real princess however the queen still wants to make sure.  The queen places a pea under twenty mattresses and twenty featherbeds as a test.  She lets the princess stay the night, however the princess sleeps horribly.  She tosses and turns all night and wakes up very disgruntled.  The queen asks her what is wrong and the princess states that she did not sleep well whatsoever.  The queen is so thrilled because she thinks that the princess did not sleep well because only a real princess would feel the pea under all those mattresses and beds.  As a result, the queen allows the prince to marry the princess.

This is a great form of traditional literature to have in my classroom library.  The characters illustrate both silliness and cleverness.  The queen is clever in the ways that she tests all of the princesses until she finds the right one, however all of the tests are very silly.  The characters are from a wealthy background since they are king, queen and prince.  The events of this story are easy to follow and very explicit.  There is no hidden meaning or ambiguity that students would have trouble understanding.  From the very beginning, students will know that the conflict is that the prince is looking for a princess to marry and that the queen is very picky about the princess that will marry her son.  At the end, the resolution is that the princess that slept on the pea is the princess that the prince will marry because the queen dubbed her a real princess. 

Through the story students will also have the opportunity to learn plot structure. Students will learn how there is the beginning of the story which is when the prince decides he wants to marry a princess however the queen says that she has to be a real princess.  The rising action is that the queen and the prince go out across the land looking for a real princess.  The climax of the story is that they were unsuccessful in finding a real princess but during a storm a princess comes knocking on their door.  The falling action is that the princess has trouble sleeping and the queen says it’s because she placed a pea under all her mattresses and beds.  The end of the story is that the prince and the princess get the queen and king’s approval and they get married.  The only thing that is vague in this story and that students will not understand is that the setting and the time are not explicitly addressed therefore they have to be inferred or they will not be known.

The ELA MA Curriculum Frameworks that are addressed in this book are ELA.K-12.R.1.01.  Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text, ELA.K-12.R.1.02.  Determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development; summarize the key supporting details and ideas,  ELA.K-12.R.1.03.  Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text and RL.3.08.a.  Identify elements of fiction (e.g., characters, setting, plot, problem, solution) and elements of poetry (e.g., rhyme, rhythm, figurative language, alliteration, onomatopoeia).