wordless books | Expect the Miraculous

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!

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