PRIMARY COLLEGE RATIONALE

(if anyone is interested in having a copy of the Storyboard and Tale Sheets, e-mail me on penny.lee@btinternet.com and I will send them on!)

Who?

Weymouth College offers "Primary College" to all Year 6 students in the Chesil Partnership Primary Schools.  They organise a huge selection of workshops and classes from which the students can choose each day (some half-day and some whole day) and the whole event is staged over four days.

Why?

Having been asked to put together a package for Primary College, I decided to go with what I know - Storytelling and used David's legend building lesson plan as a starting point.

How?

Rather than publish the lesson plan (which changed, as they do, over the week), the process is listed below:

1.  History of Storytelling:  Q/A session on how "news" was circulated in history - leads to Storytelling for information and Storytelling for entertainment.

2.  Storyboard:  students were given an A3 storyboard sheet with the different stages of putting a tale together clearly identified.  A model (produced rather badly by me!) was displayed on the IWB to show the process. 

3.  Setting:  the first stage in creating a tale is to decide where it takes place.  A boardstorm of ideas helps focus the mind and students could choose one of the settings they had suggested or come up with their own.  We found that ALL students were able to move straight on to creating their tale from here.

4.  Process: some students chose to write notes first and draw in the scenes afterwards, others went the opposite way and some worked their way through the process drawing and writing in each stage as they went.

5.  Tale Sheet:  the students were given the option of expanding their notes onto an A4 Tale Sheet (boxes corresponded directly to their Storyboard layout).  Most students took this option, some preferred to move straight on to the next stage.

6.  Front Page:  they were encouraged to type up their tales first, then decide on layout, font, background etc (always good practice I find).  ALL students were able to get their tales typed in the time allotted (some, admittedly, with a little help!)

7.  Animation:  some students created "flip-books" to help them understand exactly how animation works.

8.  Paint:  the students selected an image from their Storyboard sheet and transferred it onto Paint.  From there they were able to save, alter, save again, and so on, until they had up to five or six "frames" for their animation.

9.  Animation:  the students went to a free animation website (address below), uploaded their frames and downloaded the resulting animation.

10. Publishing:  once the students had inserted their animation into their tale and saved the whole thing, I was able to upload them to the website.

Evaluation

The variety and clarity of each activity meant that we were able to meet all needs.  ALL students produced independent work - most were completely independent, a few did need extra support.

The fact that their work is now available to people across the world means that their sense of ownership and pride is complete and this showed throughout.

Next

We have Secondary College next week (Yr 8s from one local comprehensive school).  We will have more time with these students so are intending to start with the deconstruction of  "tales" (in the form of popular Newspaper Articles) to show that "every story follows the same pattern".  We have discovered that the Tale Sheet will, with no adaptation, meet the needs of this activity.  Thank you Rachel for the idea!

WATCH THIS SPACE!!!

Resources: