Once Upon A Time Online – Plusnet’s Fairy Tale Campaign

Once Upon A Time Online – Plusnet’s Fairy Tale Campaign

We’re a family of bookworms and my kids love reading but this is not the case for many children. Recent research shows that the amount of infrequent readers is on the rise among children aged 6 to 17 years old and even though most parents agree that reading is a special bonding time to share with your kids, the amount of parent who actually share storytimes with their kids is on a steady decline and as many as 85% admit that they don’t read aloud to their children every day.

We try to make sure we read at least one story at bedtime each night but I can see how it’s easy to fall out of this routine as life is busy and sometimes it’s hard to get your kids to bed on time and also fit in a story. On late nights, we opt for something shorter.

Plusnet has teamed up with Larry Lamb to re-imagine a trilogy of classic fairy tales for the digital generation. They’ve developed this modern series for children under 10 to show how technology is a  good thing for parents and children’s shared desire for family story time.

“As 25% of UK parents admit to changing the storylines of classic tales to fit today’s values, the series puts a new spin on the timeless morals from beloved tales and tells them through a modern-day lens relevant to today’s digital world. The three stories reflect the language and lives of digitally savvy youngsters who’ve grown up online. The stories are packed with references that will be appreciated by parents and kids alike – showing the lighter side to how technology is now entwined with our lives.”

To celebrate Plusnets ‘Once Upon a Time Online’ series, we were invited to recreate one of our favourite fairy tales at home, with a modern twist! We were sent a bundle of items to use for the task.

We first read the beautiful fairy tale book and then chose a story to modernise. We took inspiration from The Three Billy Goats Gruff and created a story about three unicorns instead. Don’t know how modern unicorns are but many kids these days are definitely unicorn obsessed!

My eldest daughter, who is 5 years old, and I discussed how the story would go, then we wrote it down in a notebook, taking turns to write, and my daughter had lots of fun illustrating the story using the new pens.

In our story — The Three Silly Unicorns Fluff — the three unicorns need to get home to their castle but spot a dragon under their moat, so they’re scared to cross. They all think of different ways to get to the castle while the dragon watches them with a confused look on his face.

At the end, they find out that the dragon was actually a very friendly dragon and a vegetarian too, so he had no intention of eating the unicorns — how silly they’d been.

This was such a fun project to work on together and my daughter loves the story we created. She’s read it to the rest of the family and also wants to take it to school to show and read to her teacher and friends. She enjoyed watching and listening to Plusnet’s Once Upon A Time Online stories too.

In collaboration with Plusnet. The supplies were gifted for this blog post.