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.
  

From    to  

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.

Miss Kramer's Poetry Presentation

Miss Czelazewicz's Pre-Kindergarten Memories

Miss Larson's Kindergarten Digital Story

Miss Moore's Classroom Expectations and Rules Digital Story

Miss. Peace's Class Book Reviews

Summer Learning

I love learning!  How about you?

I always encourage my students to continue learning over the summer.  I send home a summer learning packet that includes activities that reinforce skills we learned throughout the year.  I like to include hot spots to visit, and interesting ways to learn outdoors.  I also encourage everyone to "Keep Reading!"

How do you encourage summer learning with your class?

Frozen in Time

This week in class I learned about Voki.  I decided to check it out and play around. I stumbled upon an avatar that looks similar to one of the characters from the hit movie Frozen.  The songs have captivated children and adults.  No matter where I go someone is singing the songs out loud.  Here is the Voki I created...

You can create a free account at Voki and begin creating your own Voki right now!  The tutorial below is a great resource to help you create and publish your Voki

Look in the sky...it's a Storybird!

Storybird is a great website to encourage storytelling with your students.  The website has a collection of illustrations that can be combined in order to make a visual story.  The author can type in the words to a story as well as organize how the illustrations are presented.  The website also allows you to read many different stories that have been created by others.

Tonight in class, Liz, Jenn, and I created our first Storybird story.  There was a variety of artwork that caught our eye, but we decided to use the artwork of Hedgehog and Co.  We collaborated to create an if/then story similar to Laura Numeroff's If You Give a... series.  It was a lot of fun, but frustrating when we realized our story got deleted.  Despite our mishap, we were able to quickly recreate it.  You can check it out below.  I hope you like it!

One Small Step...

Well, here I go!  This is my first blog entry, and I'm not sure where to begin.  I expect this to be an exciting adventure we will take together, and I hope you will help me along the way.  I am looking forward to share about my kindergarten students' yearly journey.  Stay tuned to learn more!