Tag Archives: storybird

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Kindergarten Storybirds

Two Kindergarten classes just finished a writing project using Storybird.  Storybird allows a user to select illustrations for a story, sequence them, and add text to create a book.  Any time we plan a project like this, we consider what the barriers are to artistic expression.  For Kindergarten, some of the barriers included:

  • limited knowledge of technology use due to lack of technology in that grade
  • the ability to read the text of stories that could be mentor texts
  • writing the story vs. telling the story orally

To lower the barriers, the teachers and I planned a series of lessons and opportunities to support the students.

Lesson 1:  Spend time revisiting the 3 ways to read a story:  read the words, read the pictures, retell.  Focus on reading the pictures by looking at a wordless book together.

In between lessons:  In class, students practiced telling stories from wordless books in small groups, alone, and at centers.

Lesson 2:  Look at a sequence of 3 pictures and think about a beginning, middle, and end for those pictures.

Lesson 3 (or part of lesson 2):  Look at Storybird.  Choose a topic  of pictures, like pumpkins, and choose 3 pictures to sequence that could be the beginning, middle, and end of a story.  Write the story together as a class with time to pair share ideas.

Lesson 4:  In small groups with adult support, students created a group Storybird project.  We made as many groups as we had adults.  For one class this was 4 groups and for the other it was 5 groups.  The adult’s role was to facilitate the conversation of the students and make sure each voice was heard in the group.  The adult also typed the story for the students as they told the story.  The students were supposed to show the adult what to click on at each step of the project.

In between lesson:  One group at a time came to the library and used Screencastomatic to record the audio of their story.  If students had difficulty reading the words, we whispered the words to them and they repeated them.   Videos were uploaded to Youtube.

Lesson 5:  The whole class came to the library for a premiere of their audio ebooks!

 

You can enjoy all of their books here!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Rhyming Words and Storybird

Our Kindergarten students have been learning about rhyming words.  For our library lesson, we read two different stories.

Storybird - Say What-! (Our Version)For our first story, we read Cats’ Night Out by Caroline Stutson.  Students gave me a thumbs up when they heard rhyming words.  Sometimes we paused and they told a partner the rhyming words they heard.  Other times we shared them aloud to the whole group.  We also took time to notice that there was a counting pattern in this book, counting by twos.

For our second story, we read Say What? by Angela DiTerlizzi.  This book explores the sounds that animals make and thinks about what animals might really be saying when they make their sounds.  This book sets up a great pattern that students can model in their own writing.cats' night out

For our work time, I put together a Storybird to use with all of the classes that participated in this lesson.  I searched for animal pictures within Storybird and pulled a few onto each page of the book.  Then, I typed the sentence starters for each animal.  “When a _______________ says _______________ does she really mean _________________________?”  Each class brainstormed rhyming word pairs for each animal picture.  It was about 2-3 pictures per class.  After the final class, we had written a collaborative ebook.  I emailed the link to all of the teachers so that students could see how the book turned out.

This lesson also served another purpose.  It was an authentic way to show a web tool that students would be using in the future.  Rather than teach about making a Storybird, students saw a Storybird in action.  Now, when we actually look at some of the steps, they’ll have a concrete example of a finished product to reference.  This was the first time that I have tried this, and I’m curious to see how it will impact future Storybird projects.

Read their final version of the story here.

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Storybird Round 3

Ms. Carney’s Kindergarten Class came today to write storybirds in small groups.  Ms. Carney, Ms. Samuel, and I each facilitated a group and a parent volunteer rotated among the groups to assist as needed.  This class followed a similar sequence of lessons that other Kindergarten classes had followed.  Please see previous storybird posts for those details.

Here are their final results:

Pratt & the Pirates

Fluffy Bunny & Her Best Friend Frank

The Little Boy Lost in Space

The Black Cat Finds Friends

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More Kindergarten Storybirds

These cards were used prior to moving into Storybird.

These cards were used prior to moving into Storybird.

You may remember from earlier in the year that Ms. Hocking’s Kindergarten class worked on a sequence of lessons in the library and in their classroom to eventually produce their own story inspired by art using Storybird.  Now, even more of the Kindergarten classes are working on a similar sequence of lessons.  We have spent time on the common core standard:

ELACCKRL7:  With prompting and support, describe the relationship between illustrations and the story in which they appear (e.g., what moment in a story an illustration depicts).

This has been done through wordless picture books, picture books where part of the story is told in text and part in pictures, and picture books where the pictures support the text.  Students read these books in class lessons as well as in the library.

To prepare for Storybird, we started by using storytelling cards from a set of cards called “Tell Me a Story“.  I chose a sequence of cards and then had the kids begin telling the story and linking the story from one card to another.  As we transitioned to Storybird, I told them that it was like pulling illustrations from a big deck of cards and figuring out how the story connected together across cards.  We wrote a Storybird together as a class to model the thinking it takes to select a sequence of pictures as well as create text that ties together the pictures.

Finally, in small groups with an adult, students wrote their own storybird. The role of the adult was to lower the barriers to artistic expression by helping students with things like typing, taking turns, etc.   Today, Ms. Seeling’s class (Mrs. Boyle’s Class), created their stories in small groups.  We had 5 groups led by me, Ms. Seeling, the parapro, a student teacher, and a parent volunteer.  Here are their final stories:

They Are Friends

The Rabbit and His Friends

A Porcupine Babysitter

The Mean Gorilla

The Porcupine Dream

Ms. Seeling also hopes to have some students make individual stories and then use Screencast-o-matic to record the students reading their stories.  I love how each teacher and class is learning from what previous classes did and building onto what was accomplished.

 

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Storybird with Kindergarten

Mrs. Kelly Hocking’s Kindergarten class has been hard at work collaborating with me in the media center on writing stories from art.  This idea was initiated in their classroom, and Mrs. Hocking asked me how I might support their class in doing this exploration using some kind of technology.

To start, I showed the class Storybird very briefly.  Storybird offers collections of artwork that inspire stories.  You select images from a collection and add your story.  Then, you publish your digital book to the web.

We spent the remainder of the first session looking at a wordless picture book under the document camera.  We used Andy Runton’s Owly and Wormy: Friends All Aflutter.  On each page, we asked ourselves who is in the picture?, where are they?, and what are they doing?  We split into 4 groups to look at even more wordless books in a smaller setting.  The classroom teacher, paraprofessional, special education teacher, and EIP teacher all supported a group.  I rotated between all 4 groups and took over groups if the teacher needed to give a particular student more support.

A couple of weeks went by where the students continued to use wordless books in their classroom to practice telling stories from art.  When they returned to the media center, I did a whole group modeling of how to use Storybird.  We looked at features like how to add a page, how to drag and drop a picture, and where to type the words.  We also talked about putting together a story and how you have to think carefully about which picture makes the most sense to come next in the story.  Finally, we talked about how to go back and re-read your story and make changes if needed.

The final lesson was back in small groups in the media center.  Each group had the same adult leaders and a laptop logged into storybird.  Each group had a different account.  The adult facilitated each group in creating their own storybird, but the students were expected to interact with the technology and construct the story.  The adult did most of the typing while the students selected pictures, typed limited text, and added pages.  Even in small groups, it was a challenge to maintain focus, but each group completed their story in our 45 minute time block.

These students are the only students in the school to have used Storybird, so they are now available to show other students and teachers in the school how it works.  I look forward to trying this again with many more classes.

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Read their Storybirds here:

Dragon Bat Girl Attacks Creepy Girl

Super Lightening Boy Saves the Day

The Party

The Happy Fairy and the Five Birds