writing from pictures | 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!

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.