Team 405: Storyboarding, storytelling, writing and readers theater
This was an exciting week for Team 405, a 2/3 class at PS3. They not only created their own American Indian pourquoi tales, but also learned how to storyboard, edit, tell stories and turn their stories into readers theater.
Charly, Team 406’s teacher, introduced me to Magnus Sweger, Team 405’s teacher. He had heard about my thesis project and wanted to see, if he could integrate it into his classroom. His class is studying American Indians and he had just started the American Indian pourquoi story unit. We met last week and devised a 3-part storytelling activity with the learning goal for the students to 1. understand the structure of pourquoi tales and 2. show this understanding through retelling and creating of pourquoi stories. Our plan:
Tuesday: retell the rainbow crow story (45 minutes)
Wednesday: create your own pourquoi story (45 minutes)
Thursday: edit your pourquoi tale and add words (45 minutes)
However the week unfolded very differently and I’m in awe of Magnus and the students and what they were able to achieve in such a short time. Magnus used the visual storytelling framework to create an amazing pourquoi tale unit, modeling and facilitating throughout and thus showing me the possibilities of the framework and its flexibility.
Monday
Long story short, Magnus was so inspired by the idea of storyboarding that he started the unit on Monday, a day early. At that point he didn’t have any materials, so used what he had in the classroom: brown construction paper and 3 x 3 post-its.
Tuesday
By the time I arrived on Tuesday, the students were well into creating their stories. Magnus had modeled the story board structure and story input elements on a large sheet of paper. Above, on the left, you can see the way Magnus had initially introduced the structure of a pourquoi tale (8 written paragraphs) and how he introduced it with my visual framework (8 visual story boxes with an intro summary of main character, setting and plot).
Many kids wanted to directly create their own pourquoi tale, so instead of two activities (1 retelling activity + 1 creation activity) Magnus decided to give the students the choice to either retell one of the stories he had read to them or create their own story. He also gave them the choice to create a story collaboratively or individually—about 2/3 of the students chose to work in a group.
Those own creations were hilarious and really showed the students understanding of pourquoi stories and their structure—I truly believe that by creating their own story a much deeper understanding and learning was achieved:
• Why fish are swimming
• How cats got their whiskers
• How the fox got red fur
• How ducks turned yellow
In the last 20 minutes of this class, Magnus modeled storytelling. He wrote story beginnings and other transition words onto the board and told the story he had modeled the day before. Then it was the students’ turn. Two groups presented—pointing to the story boxes while telling the story.
Wednesday
On Wednesday the students continued creating their stories. Magnus started the class with modeling how to edit and revise a story. He again used his story for this and talked about how, based on comments from yesterday, he needed to add a scene (post-it) at the beginning to make the story clearer. 2 more groups presenting their stories at the beginning and another 2 groups at the end of class—they received feedback from their friends and knew where they needed to clarify or make changes to their stories.
This really emphasized the benefit of oral storytelling: the students could quickly tell their story and learn where they needed to clarify or alter their story without having spend a lot of time on actually writing the story.
After class we had a recap and decided that it would be good for the students to write their stories the next day. Magnus emailed me in the evening that he had come up with a perfect outcome for this unit: readers theater. The kids would write the dialogue of their characters and would then read their dialogue to the class with expressive voices. I was ecstatic—this was the perfect outcome. The students would continue their collaborations and each students would play one of the characters in the story—usually a narrator, main character and depending on the story another 1-3 other characters. Students that had worked on their own would need to solicit friends to help them perform their stories.
Thursday
On Thursday, Magnus started with handing out a readers theater pourquoi tale (how the dog got his wet nose) and they narrated/played out the story with different kids taking on the different characters of the story. Then they went back into groups and started writing their stories. The class ended with Magnus reading 3 of the pourquoi tales the students had created. They will continue to fine-tune their stories next week and present them to their parents during a publishing party before spring break.
Learnings
By improvising and not using the materials I had prepared the learnings of this test were tremendous:
• Any teacher can do this with the materials they have in the classroom. This proves that this is a framework that is flexible.
• The concept—using visual storyboarding to deepen understanding of story structure and teaching soft skills like collaboration—works. The image above shows how Magnus usually teaches story structure compared to the visual storytelling method he deployed for this unit.
• The framework can be used in different way and kids can have a choice: 1. retell or create their own story, 2. work in a group or alone.
• It works as the starting point for a longer unit with flexible outcomes (published book, oral storytelling event, performance). The readers theater feels like a natural extension as it fosters writing, collaboration, and oral storytelling.
• It seems that kids intuitively arrange the post-its in a circle—the student above chose to go in a circle even though Magnus modeled a zig-zag path. The circular arrangement, however, is more of an unplanned path: you switch directions when you can’t go any further/have no more space to put another post-it.
• Modeling/facilitation is key. It’s a great way to quickly get the students on board and understand a concept and task ahead. As instructions are modeled and visible on the white board, it eliminates the need for instructions on the activity board itself and the kids can use the space for notes.
• Collaboration needs some structure: One of the groups in the class almost got derailed because they were fighting over who had drawn on more post-its. With 30 kids in a class, it is hard to monitor things like this, and it becomes vital to add some structure. When working with Team 211, a 1st grade class last year, I had learned that collaboration needs to be facilitated if a group has more then 2 members. It is important for each kid to be assigned to a story box and be responsible for it.
• Constraints are good: one group wasn’t able able to start the writing part as they continued expanding their story. Limiting the number of story boxes/post-its is important to keep a project on track.
• Magnus had turned the pourquoi tales into 8 story boxes … I’m wondering, if this is true for other stories as well. In addition, most kids had used around 6-9 post-its. I have been using 9 boxes (3 beginning, 3 middle, 3 end). I need to investigate this further to determine what the ideal number of story boxes is for this age range.
• I also learned that having the kids use markers and smaller post-its (2 x 2) is a good thing as it encourages quick sketches and doesn’t really allow for detailed drawings. The drawings are meant to be visual notes and not perfect and detailed drawings—we saw that a couple groups spend a lot of time finessing their drawings instead of starting with the writing part.
In conclusion: it is wonderful to see the imagination come out in these stories and how much much fun the kids have creating the stories and collaborating on them. This would not have been possible without a great teacher: A framework is a guiding path—it needs to be brought to life by the teacher. It was inspiring to see how Magnus used the framework to teach his students how to storyboard, tell pourquoi tales, edit, and create readers theater in four 45-minute classes and simultaneously inspire and engage them. He gave each group/student a clear path ahead but also room to explore, imagine and create. I can’t wait to hear the students’s final readers theater stories.
