Our Grade 6 & 7 Authors Shine using Canva and Book Creator Together

My Grade 6 and Grade 7 computer class learners were hard at work, a while back, writing and publishing their own creative stories using Canva and Book Creator together. 

Using Canva for planning, drafting, and designing their pages, and Book Creator for publishing their final books, the learners explored what it means to be real authors. They experimented with characters, settings, plot twists, illustrations, and digital layout design. 

Each learner produced an interesting story, full of imagination.

You are  invited to view their completed books in their online Book Creator library.

Grade 6 stories: https://read.bookcreator.com/library/-OBUNiYlTp-nEIFnq262 
Grade 7 stories: https://read.bookcreator.com/library/-OBSC4H-n8ZM9HDmEBZd

Our Grade 2 'Dot' map stories to celebrate International Dot Day 15th September 2021 -

I am always excited about Dot Day on 15 September. What is Dot Day? It is HUGE around the world! Dot Day was inspired by Peter Reynold's story 'The Dot'. The message is simple but profound: “Start with a dot and see where it will take you,” It is an encouragement to children to find their gift and make their mark in their community. I love this positive approach. Children all over the world love celebrating International Dot Day.

Dot Day in 2019 was especially exciting. My classes were part of a Team blog made up of students from four different continents. (The Team blog can be found at https://dotday.edublogs.org/) We did activities together and the teachers and students loved every minute. I wrote six posts about it on my blog here: https://bit.ly/3EKK0KY 

This year My Grade 2s participated in Dot Day. First we read Peter Reynold's famous and lovely story, 'The Dot' online and discussed it. Children love this story. So do I. Here it is below: 

Our map story activity

1. After reading and disussing the story, we used our imaginations and wrote about a dot taking us on a trip around the world  I gave them maps of the world.  You can find the template here: https://bit.ly/3o355dx

2. The class copied and pasted textboxes and arrows at various places on the map,  and wrote about their journey around the world. 

Examples

Here are some examples of their work.

Grade 7s created stories from pictures and turned them into videos

I love thinking of different ways to get my classes writing and seeing themselves as writers and story tellers. I used the following method with Grade 6 and 7 this year, but in this post I will only talk about Grade 7.

I used the following process with Grade 7:

The elements of a good story

As always, our  lesson concentrated on the elements of a good story – characters, setting, a plot, a conflict, and a resolution to the project. We practised this in different ways orally in the lesson.

Tell the story from pictures

Some time ago I downloaded some wonderful Creative Commons stories from the African Storybook website https://www.africanstorybook.org/  . I removed the title and the words, but kept the art and details of the original stories as a Creative Commons requirement. I put the art on to PowerPoints and I numbered the stories. Each student in Grade 6 and 7 chose a number. Their task would be to turn the pictures into their own story and make sure they included the elements of a story. 

Create a video of your story using Screencastify

The Grade 7s then used the Chrome extension,  Screencastify, to narrate their stories and turn them into videos.  

Examples of the stories

1. Original: The Girl Who Could Fly by Ingrid Schechter. llustration - Ingrid Schechter and Amir Bachir António Necas. Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 Source: www.africanstorybook.org

Casseddie’s Big Surprise by Casbru

2. Original: A Hot Saturday by Nathi and David; Translation - Nathi and David; Illustration - Wiehan de Jager Language – English. Creative Commons: Attribution 3. Source www.africanstorybook.org

A Hot Saturday by Ethkau

The Hottest Saturday by Geolev

Create stories from selected images and publish them in Book Creator (Grade 6)

One of the things I love doing at school is getting my students to write stories in different ways. I want them to see themselves as writers, able to tell and write amazing stories that hold the attention of whoever is listening.

I used the following process with Grade 6.

The elements of a good story

Our story lesson concentrated on the elements of a good story – characters, setting, a plot, a conflict, and a resolution to the project. We practised this in different ways orally in the lesson.

Find the story in a selection of art

Some time ago I downloaded some wonderful Creative Commons stories from the African Storybook website. I removed the words, but kept the art and details of the original stories as a Creative Commons requirement. I put the art on to PowerPoints and I numbered the stories. Each student chose a number. Their task would be to turn the pictures into their own story and make sure they included the elements of a story. Here is an example. The following art was from a story from the African storybook website called ‘Bongsa and her landlord – best friends’ by Roth Odondi. The illustrator is Rob Owen. Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0. https://bit.ly/3EkaRgr 

                

Using Book Creator as a publishing tool

How would they present their stories? I felt that they should get to know the wonderful program Book Creator which is a free program.  I created a PowerPoint of instructions that they could follow and off we went into our storytelling adventure. The final step would be for them to narrate their stories in Book Creator. 

The result was very pleasing. Book Creator set the stories out neatly in a bookshelf. 

You can visit our Grade 6 library on this link, https://bit.ly/3gLYU8k , and read (and listen to) some of the stories. 

Story writing #1: Using 'Design Ideas' in PowerPoint to create attractive story backgrounds with Grade 5

I am starting a series of story-writing posts today. This is the first one of three. 

One of the teachers at my school wanted help in publishing stories digitally rather than having the students write them in their books. So we worked together in creating lovely stories in PowerPoint. Powerpoint is a perfect application for publishing stories. In this post I want to suggest a way for a student to use the Bing browser and PowerPoint to create a background for an illustrated, digital story - a background that will vary from slide to slide, but keep to the original theme. 

Write stories that can be published

One of the things that I love doing in my classes is getting the students to write stories and publish them in different ways. I've always been of the opinion that it's such a pity to write a story at school and then let it just 'disappear into nothingness' in an exercise book. Why not get it published digitally, and share it with the world! My classes all have blogs, so they are able to publish the finished products on their blogs.

Use PowerPoint for writing stories

Microsoft PowerPoint is a great tool for writing stories.  Our students use mainly Chromebooks so we used the online Office and PowerPoint which they sign into with their Microsoft accounts. (Our school is in the throws of getting Office 365 for the learners – I can’t wait!).

Create backgrounds using 'Design Ideas' in PowerPoint

The wonderful thing about using PowerPoint is that it has a feature called Design Ideas. So every time you insert an image into a slide, Design Ideas comes into play down the right side and gives all sorts of suggestions for placing the image on the slide. Consequently you can use one background image in a variety of ways. Here is an example: 

How to create varied backgrounds

My class was writing a story about ‘Three wishes’ so, after the story had been planned, they needed to prepare a presentation in PowerPoint and create suitable backgrounds for the story on their slides.  

This is how to go about it:

1.  In PowerPoint create a presentation with around 5 – 8 blank slides.

2. Go to Insert/ Pictures/ Online pictures

3. This automatically opens the Bing Browser which you can set to only include Creative Commons images which are free to use. Type in, for example, ‘Clipart nature scene’.

4. Choose one and select Insert

You'll notice that 'Design Ideas' immediately goes into play and suggests ideas. Choose from these ideas. 

Examples of backgrounds 

Here are a few examples of backgrounds my class created using 'Design Ideas'. Take a look through. They created around 8+ different backgrounds, in the same theme,  with each image.  

 

 

Next steps

Once their presentations had been created, with varied backgrounds, the class added their stories and then set about adding illustrations. That process is for another blog post! But in the meantime - here is a link to the finished stories which i have captured in a Wakelet: https://wke.lt/w/s/epv3qS

Stories inspired by the Quiver app for International Dot Day

My Grade 1-3 classes have thoroughly enjoyed being part of a team blog doing activities together for International Dot Day on the 15th September 2018. The lesson I am going to describe now is possibly the last activity we'll do for Dot Day seeing that today is already the 13th September! Dot Day is based on the inspiring children's book written by Peter Reynolds. You can find it on YouTube here.

On our collaborative team blog the Australian classes formed themselves into teams. Each team wrote some words on dots and challenged us to make a story with the words. They called this activity 'Connect the Dots'.  Here is one of the Australian teams:

Team Shark
pen, splash, China, shark, potato

This is what today's activity sets out to do - create those stories. However, in a previous lesson we used the wonderful AR app called Quiver and those 3D balls that my class loved viewing through the app led to the inspiration for the following stories.

The task:

• Using the provided world map (which is royalty free map) write a quick imaginative story about the journey of your dot as it comes alive and leaves the classroom taking you with it.
• Make sure you use the words from your assigned Australian team. Underline or colour the words that they ask you to use.

The result

I was really pleased with the outome. The class wrote some imaginative stories showing the dots travels, I have embedded them below using PowerPoint online.

Our Grade 3 'What happens next?' stories

Can you add an ending to any of our stories?

My Grade 3 class has been having such a lot of fun with prepare preparing for International Dot Day.which is on the 15th September 2018. What has made it an extra amount of fun is that we are part of a team blog with classes 3 other countries - Australia Canada and the United States and we are all doing fun writing and other activities together, connected related to Dot Day.

If you take a peek at our collaborative blog you will see that one of the activities is Connect the Dot stories. My Grade 3 class has done a variation of this activity and we have called it 'What happens next?'

This is how we went about the lesson.

• We all listened to Peter Reynolds reading the DOT STORY (we unfortunately do not have the book yet).As we listened to the story we wrote down words that had caught our attention during the reading of the story, on a piece of paper.
• After that we chose 3 or 4 of our words, plus we added 2 random words that were not in the story, and we swapped papers.
• Whoever received the new set of words needed to write a story using those words. The story needed to end with 'What happens next'.
• We did this lesson using a collaborative Google slides presentation. We used two slides from the Slides Carnival free template Eglamour because the template contained two lovely dot slides.

We had fun reading each other's stories. However we did not have time to write about what happens next. Can you help us? If you would like to help us just add the the name of the story in the comment ox along with another few sentences. We would love that!

Here are our stories:

 

Storybird #6: Tips for writing original stories

Storybird is my favourite free story writing application on the web. I use it with my classes all the time, and I love all its tips. This is a great post from the Storybird blog in 2015 on how to write original stories https://goo.gl/bJJSg4 -  I am going to add their ideas here, straight from the blog. Every time I get my classes to write stories I will show them this post.

                                        _____________________________________________

7 tips for writing original stories

"There’s that old saying that claims there are only seven plot lines in the whole world. 

"Below are 7 tips to use when you’re not sure where to begin.

"1. Look at the world around you, and ask “what if” about things we take for granted. What if the sky was red? What if your little brother was actually an alien? What if you found a million dollars?

2. Browse through the artwork on Storybird until a picture jumps out at you and makes you wonder, what’s happening here? Who are these people? Where are they, and how did they get there? What are they going to do next?

3. Start with a character who seems interesting to you. Maybe it is a character who has your same habits or fears or strengths and uses them in meaningful ways. Or maybe it is a character who is nothing like you, and that’s what makes them interesting to write about. How they would approach different situations?

4. Pick a genre, or type of storytelling. Do you like history? Then write about a time or place as it used to be. Do you like fantasy? Then start by thinking about how a world would work if it had different rules than ours, and fill it up with magic or supernatural creatures. Do you like romance? Then take two characters and put a lot of obstacles between them so the way they get together becomes a tale.

5. Ask your friends or family what they like to read, and write a story just for them! (Hint: this is a great Mother’s Day/Father’s Day gift idea.)

6. Solve a mystery. Which one of these characters is hiding a secret? Who is watching whom?

7. Remember those seven plots we mentioned at the beginning of this post? Use them to your advantage. Match a piece of artwork on Storybird with one of the storylines below, and take it for a spin!

- Overcoming the Monster
- Rags to Riches
- The Quest
- Voyage and Return
- Comedy
- Tragedy
- Rebirth"

              ________________________

Some great ideas from Storybird! If you haven't joined your class to Storybird go to www.storybird.com  and do so today!

Google Slides: Publish a Google Slides story in different ways on the Internet

Google Slides is great for writing stories. One can use half a slide for the story and the other half for the illustration.  My Grade 5 class took part in a writing project with two schools in other countries - one in the USA and one in Argentine. We wrote collaborative stories, with my class working in groups of three and starting the story. We were also responsible for the final editing and the illustrations. We used a purchased program that is no longer available to do the illustrations.

It can also be presented online as a Google slideshow as illustrated below. However, the great thing about writing a story in Google Slides is that it can be downloaded as PDF and then uploaded to a variety of free online sites such as Slideboom, Slideshare and Youblisher among others.   The example below shows the story in Google Slides as a presentation and then in Youblisher as an e-book.

a) As a Google online slideshow



b) In Youblisher.com as an e-book
Click on the image below to be taken to Youblisher.com http://goo.gl/QPd6Nn

Ways of illustrating digital stories

We had a number of really excellent stories from teachers who discovered their writing gift within them. Something that fascinated me during this course was the ingenious ways that teachers used to illustrate their stories. Take a look!

Fabric with felt cut outs which were then captured with a camera as shown in  ‘Emily and the Seagull’.	Own photos with words at the side and a colourful background as shown in ‘There’s a zoo in my school’.
Some used royalty-free images from  the Internet such as in ‘The sheep who wanted to knit’.	Some asked different learners in their class to illustrate each page as shown in ‘Sisipho signs away’.
Some teachers asked their students  to create their own illustrations using Microsoft Paint such as in ‘Bunny  tells the children’.	Some asked their own family to do their illustrations
Some created templates and coloured  them in such as in ‘Khotso goes to the  zoo’.	Some asked a talented friend to do their illustrations for them such as in ‘The noise in the night’.
Some used royalty free pictures from  Pixabay such as ‘Angus the Dinosaur’.	Some created tasteful collages made from different materials such as in ‘Nonyane’.
Some used whole, original photos and pasted the words in a convenient spot  as in ‘On Safari’.	Some used commercially obtained illustration programmes owned by their schools such as in ‘Monsters under my bed’.

We are looking forward to the launch of the African Storybook Project website later this year.

An African Storybook Project Report back from Stirling Primary in East London

Here is another class hard at work creating stories for the African Storybook Project.  I have written about the African Storybook Project in a number of posts. The website is hopefully going live in July with stories written by South Africa teachers. If you would like your class to write stories suitable for Grade 3 students across Africa to read, please submit them by 21 June and use the guidelines found in this post. There’s still time to submit a story suitable for a Grade 3 reader for the African Storybook project. Join us!

This is a picture of Liesel Kruger from Stirling Primary School in East London.

Liesel Kruger from East London

"We are finally finished writing all the stories and I am nearing the end of
the editing.  We will be using Story Jumper to illustrate our stories and
then we will snip the pictures to use them in our PowerPoint shows.  My children
are so  enjoying Story Jumper.  In fact, my class today asked if they could
stay in at break and carry on! That says it all don't you think?  Still
quite a way to go, but so far so good... Thank you."

These are photos of the Grade 3s at work with their stories.


Thank you so much Liesel for sending this lovely report back. 

Creative Writing #12: An African Storybook Project report back from Princess Primary School in Roodepoort

Thank you so much to those who are sending in their stories about how their writing is going for the African Storybook Project. This is a fantastic project for Grades 1-3 children in Africa where the plan is to create an awesome website of stories that teachers and their classes around Africa can use. The blog post that gives more information about this project is: There’s still time to submit a story suitable for a Grade 3 reader for the African Storybook project. Join us!

The story in this post comes from Princess Primary School in Roodepoort where Eden Daniels teachers Grade 7. Listen to what she has to say:

“I am Eden Daniels,the Grade 7 English teacher at Princess Primary School in Roodepoort.

Eden Daniels from Princess Primary School in Roodepoort

When I first read of this amazing project I thought of incorporating  it into my Creative Writing Assignment for Term 3.The learners first wrote their stories in their Classwork books then transferred it to the computers in the computer centre.I had never seen kids so excited about a project before.They actually begged to remain in the computer centre  during breaks and after school.

We don't have an ICT  teacher at our school any more so I don't have help at school. The 4 week course really helped.The free image websites really assisted the kids. I downloaded many pictures according to the children's requests as most of them are underprivileged and do not have computers at home.These pictures were then copied onto the computers for them to pick and choose from.Some of them brought their own pictures and others submitted drawings.”

Thank you so much for this wonderful report back Eden. I am thrilled to hear how the class enjoyed writing.

Creative Writing #11:An African Storybook project report back from Karin Horne

I am always so thrilled when teachers send in some information about their writing for the African Storybook Project. I would like to thank Karin Horne, the Deputy Principal from Crawford Preparatory in Pretoria for sending in this picture and information. Karin says, “This is a picture of me down loading photographs from my camera and phone, to use in my story.”

Karin Horne from Crawford Preparatory School in Pretoria

Karin has also sent in the delightful story she wrote called ‘The sheep who wanted to knit.”

Thank you so much for sending in all of this to us, Karin. Perhaps you'll write another lovely story as well?

An opportunity for you the reader

If you are reading this and you feel you would like to write a story for the African Storybook Project yourself or with your class before the 21st June, Please could I invite you to do so. The following blogpost has the details...There’s still time to submit a story suitable for a Grade 3 reader for the African Storybook project. Join us!

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