Diary of a Kindergarten Teacher: More Than a Digital Story: It's a Literacy Project

Reading and Writing are one of my favorite things to teach and explore with my students. In addition, reading and writing are a combined passion for many of my students this year. I often read books throughout the year that naturally relate to writing. So when I read Mary Had a Little Lamp, by Jack Lechner, for a class read aloud, I knew a creating class book would be a great extension activity. The book ended with, "Now Mary has a toaster," so our class book became Mary Had a Little Toaster.

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Since being introduced to digital storytelling in my Integrating Technology course, I decided that this class book was going to become our very first digital story. After learning about and experimenting with VoiceThread in my graduate class, I decided it would be a great program to introduce to the young learners in my kindergarten class. However, before we could dive into VoiceThread, there were a few other steps we needed to take first.

Step 1: Briefly revisit read aloud from previous session.
Step 2: Brainstorm places Mary could bring her toaster and chart on chart
paper. This list served as a resource for the children to utilize during
their independent work session.
Step 3: Class Vote - Since we were making a class book, we decided it would
be important for Mary to look similar on everyone's page. We decided that if we all drew her with the same color hair she would look
similar. We took a vote and decided Mary would have blond hair.

Step 4: Draw - The children turned and talked about where they would have Mary take her toaster. Then they were off to their tables and drawing. When children finished early, I challenged them to think
about what Mary would have next and draw about it. We later voted
on their item for the last page of our story.

Step 5: Write - Each child wrote a sentence or two on the back of their
picture that would be narrated in our digital story.

Composing our digital story was fairly easy. After the children shared their work, we compiled them into an order that made sense by sorting the pictures based on the setting. I photographed and uploaded their illustrations in VoiceThread. VoiceThread allows you to upload more than one photo at a time so I was able to do it with one quick click and a few minutes of patience. Finally, each child narrated the sentence for their illustrations. The children were very proud of their work, and enthusiastic about creating a digital story. Their work could have simply been turned into a class book that was bound together and sat on the shelf for the kids to read. VoiceThread gave the students an opportunity to expand their knowledge of writing stories. Now their classbook can be read over and over outside of our classroom since it has been shared with their families. After a literacy rich project, this is our final product.

I recommend VoiceThread to anyone that wants to expand the literacy instruction children receive in the classroom. It is an easy to navigate application that can be integrated in the classroom to make class books or to develop digital stories for instruction. If you are interested in using VoiceThread, check out this tutorial and follow the links below to other literacy creations using VoiceThread.