Creative Writing #10: An African Storybook Project report back from The Rock Academy…

I am SO thrilled when teachers send reports on how their Digital Storytelling writing is going for the African Storybook Project. This is an amazing project. The plan is to create a huge website of stories for the Grade 1-3 children of Africa where the stories can be read, translated and adapted for use by teachers and students across Africa. The website is due to be launched in July and the idea is to populate it at its launch with donated stories created by mainly South African teachers and students. 

Today’s report back comes from The Rock Academy in Fish Hoek where the Grade 6 teacher, Christine Venter, is working in conjunction with the ICT teacher, Lisa Gair, in engaging the Grade 6s in writing for the project. This is what they say:

“Mrs Gair & Mrs Venter reporting…

Lisa Gair (left - ICT teacher) and Christine Venter (right - Grade 6 teacher) 

The Grade 6 Rock Academy kids have loved taking on this writing adventure. They started off with a bang, ideas were pouring out, and constant chit chat was happening while comparing their ideas. They knuckled down quickly to get their thoughts on paper and developed their story line.  Some were so eager they took their writing home to complete in one afternoon (even though they had 2 weeks to get it done).

Now we're on our animation stage and they are also loving this too. It has been a growing, and fun experience for each child individually and as a class.

They have moved to the ICT Centre and are busy typing up their stories in PowerPoint and doing their illustrations in Paint. We are learning lots of new skills in both programs and are looking forward to reading their final products!”

Mrs Christine Venter with her Grade 6 writing their stories

Thank you SO much for participating in the project and for this wonderful report back Mrs Venter and Mrs Gair – we can’t wait to read your stories!

Try using Storybird with its beautiful art for inspired writing sessions

Storybird can be accessed at http://storybird.com/. This is a wonderful free creative writing site where you can create your own stories using interesting and beautiful images provided by a variety of illustrators. These can be summarised as 'short, art-inspired stories' and they are great for writing collaboratively or for individual writing. Teachers can get a free account for each class with easy access which is a great timesaver. Users can share their stories by sending a URL via e-mail, or they can purchase them.

How to use in the classroom
*Excite the students about becoming a published author
*Explain that their work will be read by people all over the world
*Have the writings be completed before they publish to the web... if they already have a draft of a story. It becomes easier to chunk their sentences to import into different pages to represent the given art work.

Tutorials

Storybird demo.movie

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWrslLyuXk8 

Super Storytelling with StoryBird

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T00YjRBIcIw


An example of  a story
Examples of friendship, love and family in nature



Further Reading
http://www.edutopia.org/blog/storybird-new-teacher-boot-camp-lisa-dabbs

Do try Storybird with your class. It is a great way of encouraging reluctant writer to write and feel very proud of their achievements. 

Use YouTube stories to inspire your class to write...

There are many ways to get your class to write stories. This idea is to use YouTube videos to inspire writing. You could use these in different ways such as:

• Talk about the structure of a story in terms that your age group understands
• Show a video and then discuss the structure of the story or analyse the stages of a story
• Watch the story and ask your class to rewrite it and change it. 

1. Owl Stories by Martin Waddell
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJe0WupukAw




2. Handa’s Surprise by Eileene Browne
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyIV_xYi0as


3. Handa’s Hen by Eileen Browne
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyIV_xYi0as




An example of how to use these videos

Let's make a start by watching ‘Owl Stories’ by Martin Waddell and then let's analyse it. Let’s see how a problem was brought in and resolved to make this beautiful story so appealing. I’ll use the following story structure idea, namely the idea of asking 'What If' and to keep asking 'What if?' until a plot emerges. 

What if question? 'What if the mother of new baby owls didn't come back from hunting for food?'  Keep asking related 'What if' questions and slowly a plot emerges as follows

1. Beginning: The babies are in their nest
2. Middle. A problem is introduced
    a) Mother Owl doesn’t come back.
    b) The baby owls start searching in the dark woods
    c) They discuss where they think Mommy could be
3. The end: The problem is resolved – Mommy comes back and finds them. 

A task
Why not take one of the other stories and see if you can analyse them to see if there was a problem or conflict introduced and resolved and how it impacted the story