Hansel and Gretel

Gingerbread house
Gingerbread house from 2010, made by Ms Stockton’s mother!

Two versions of Grimm’s fairytale of Hansel and Gretel will be used this week with Stage 1 and Early Stage 1 students. Picture books are by Tony Ross (from Arrow, 1989) and Lucy M George & Rachel Swirles (Koala, 2010).

A school made resource, a digital slideshow in PowerPoint from 2010, will also be used: Handsome & Gentle, a fractured fairy tale by Class 2FR, based on “Hansel & Gretel”.

The ugly duckling

This weeks fairy tale for Early Stage 1 and Stage 1 students is The ugly duckling by Hans Christian Andersen. We will be using the picture book adaptation by Masumi Furukawa (Flip up fairy tales series by Child’s Play, 2006).

Ugly duckling
The ugly duckling

Hans Christian Andersen bust
Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) bust

Hans Christian Andersen on Observatory Hill
Hans Christian Andersen on Observatory Hill, Sydney

Digital stories:

The ugly duckling, an assembly item by Class 2FR (from the year 2010)

The ugly caterpillar, a digital fairy tale by Class 1K (also from 2010), loosely based on “The ugly duckling”

Cockatoo and Tiger, a digital narrative by the other half of Class 1K (2010), also inspired by “The ugly duckling”.

Next week, the work will be followed up with an investigation into the attributes of ducks. The books, What is a bird? by Feana Tu’akoi (Scholastic, 2007) and Amazing facts about Australian birds (Steve Parish discover and learn, 1997) by Pat Slater, will be contrasted with the fictional ducks featured in Duck in the truck (Picture lions, HarperCollins, 2000) by Jez Alborough, Vote for Duck (Pocket, 2004) by Doreen Cronin & Betsy Lewin and The goat, the duck and the bale of hay (Viking, 2004) by Rachel Flynn & Tom Jellett.

Goldilocks and porridge

Three bears
The three bears at Penrith PS!
(These bear toys are from the picture book, You’re all my favourites by Sam McBratney & Anita Jerum.)

To enhance our Term 2 study of fairy tales, Early Stage 1 and Stage 1 students will be using the picture book, Goldilocks and the three bears (Picture lions series, Collins, 1990) by James Marshall, and these Youtube clips this week:


Goldilocks and the three bears – Kids Stories – LearnEnglish Kids British Council

From the BBC programme “Nigel’s simple cooking”, host Nigel Slater meets the 2008 World Porridge Making Champion, Ian Bishop, to find out the secret of perfect porridge:


Porridge

Digital stories:

The three bats, a digital fairy tale by Class 1/2H (in the year 2010), loosely based on “Goldilocks and the three bears”

Mr E and the three bears, a digital fairy tale by the other half of Class 1/2H (2010), also based on “Goldilocks”.

Humpty was pushed?

Humpty on the wooden block wall

Our school has had a Humpty Dumpty mural on a classroom wall for many years now. It’s amazing how fast Humpty falls again when the three-year cyclic plan for K-2 comes around again.

As is traditional, the “Chicks R Us” and their incubator turned up this week. Only one egg to hatch now!

Chicks R Us

Chicks R Us 2

Chicks R Us 3

Meanwhile, the students suggested that a PowerPoint show about the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme, made three years ago, needed one more image to make it more interesting. So, this year, Easter egg Humpty shows some leakage after falling off his wall:

Humpty

Cool Creative Commons!

I’m really getting the hang of converting students’ collaborative Keynote presentations into video podcasts – and I’m *really* loving adding “Creative Commons” music as soundtracks!

I started to investigate “Creative Commons” sites last year, and found a few pieces of music that would have worked (the Stage 2 students wanted copyright free music that you could cha cha or belly dance to, and we did find one example of each!) but it all seemed too tricky last year, so our PowerPoints stayed mute. However, the ccmixter.org website is well laid out and it is quite simple to search for “Creative Commons” music by theme, musician or style. (I’ve found “scary”, “happy” and “circus” style pieces via the search engine – but beware of possible unsavoury lyrics. Stick with instrumentals only, unless you’ve previewed all the songs you will “listen to” with students). The site tells you the exact wording to place in the credits of the video podcast, movie or whatever media. After you’ve uploaded the podcast, you can relay the URL to ccmixter.org and they’ll add the online link to their searchable database.

So, just in time for Book Week, you might like to use my students’ “Mr Chicken” book trailer, and/or our “Across the Story Bridge” video podcast, and/or a revamped (from two Flickr slideshows) “Bear & Chook Adventures”. Click HERE!

Penrith PS podcasts

According to feedback, these video podcasts may require installing the latest version of Quicktime or, at least, clicking that you agree to MIME being associated with Quicktime on your computer. I’ve had the video podcasts working on Mac and PC, and they look really great on an interactive whiteboard (IWB). One teacher colleague had an earlier version of Quicktime on her IWB to enable her to run Kid Pix, and the podcasts did refuse to run on her machine.

Meanwhile, Happy Book Week!

The crocodile in the playground

Crocodile

Still working with Stage 1 on literacy projects this term, I was thrilled with our latest digital success story, again developed from a storyboard, a brainstormed narrative – and all photographed on my iPhone using local found objects and other existing props!

The main difference in approach this time was that the students weren’t currently studying one particular fairy tale in class. My first two batches of Stage 1 students this term took their inspiration from Goldilocks and the three bears, three groups used themes from The ugly duckling and an assembly item, and another group parodied Hansel and Gretel”.

This time, though, instead of deliberately setting out to create a sequel, prequel or parody, we brainstormed “characters you might find in a fairy tale”. We then paired each one up with another character on the list. Thus, one storyboard, for example, featured a princess, a mermaid and a pony. Another combined the characters of a walking tree and a talking cubby house. The strongest storyline seemed to be the one pairing a ladybug with a crocodile and this was the one the students selected for brainstorming their jointly constructed narrative. The ladybug who lost her spots is a digital fairy tale by Class 1S, partly inspired by a clever plot device from the 1963 picture book, “Swimmy” by Leo Lionni. This book was not read to the students. Rather, the students’ description of how a group of ladybugs might thwart a hungry crocodile began to remind me of the old picture book (a Caldecott Medal winner), and I suggested it as a partial solution. The result is perhaps more of a fable than a fairy tale, but ladybugs losing their spots, and being able to retrieve them again, is the “magical” quality, I guess.

What made this particular set of lessons so exciting is the feedback provided to our Reading Recovery teacher by one of our ESL students, and then relayed to me. This student was able to relate the entire plot of the story while it was still in pre-production, and the teacher had never seen him so animated and articulate about his learning before. A great result all round!

Our other digital fairy tales are here.

When storyboards collide!

Last week’s literacy sessions with a new group of Stage 1 students proved to be a challenge!

Once again, the purpose was to create storyboards, based on a well known fairy tale, that could then be photographed as a digital story. The students managed to develop two separate storylines, although both arcs hit a stalemate before we could determine their resolutions. Eventually, one student suggested combining the two sets of characters, and the story of the unlikely friendship of an ugly cockatoo and a tiger with no stripes was born. Since the only obvious common locale for a black cockatoo and a tiger would be a zoo, the students were able to explore the possibilities with gusto.

Enjoy Cockatoo and Tiger, a digital narrative by Class 1K, also loosely based on the fairy tale of “The ugly duckling”.

Zoo

Or sample more digital story PowerPoints.

Fairy tales without fairies

The ugly caterpillar

Stage 1 students are working in small groups this term, with the teacher-librarian, designing storyboards for digital stories, based on famous fairy tales. Here are some of the completed PowerPoint presentations:

* Mr E and the Three Bears, a digital fairy tale by Class 1/2H, loosely based on “Goldilocks”

* The ugly caterpillar, a digital fairy tale by Class 1K, loosely based on “The ugly duckling”.

I’ve been asked to elaborate, so here goes:

This term we are addressing Fairy Tales with Early Stage 1 and Stage 1 students and, yes, the Stage 1 students (mentioned above) are familiar with actual fairy tales before writing (or parodying) their own. I have an article on storyboarding digital stories in this term’s info@aliansw newsletter (May, #2, 2010). That article covers our 2009 “Bear & Chook” book rap digital stories with Stage 2, but the same principles are being applied here.

As part of our school’s PSP Literacy program, I’m working with a different half-class each week, across three or four days per PowerPoint (ie. 3 or 4 x 30-minute afternoon sessions depending on timetable interruptions). For example, in Weeks 2 & 3, all classes were learning about “Goldilocks and the three bears” in class (and library lessons) and then, on the first Monday afternoon, I took half of one class outside and we “retold” the story, person by person, as a “Circle Time” activity. We discussed how the story could be parodied, reversed, extended with a sequel, or whatever. Then they split off into three groups and quickly designed one storyboard per group. The next day, the three groups voted for one of the storyboards to “write”. We did that as a brainstorm, with me scribing under each panel. They, essentially, all end up with joint ownership of the one completed storyline. The next day is dedicated to a strategy meeting for taking the photos (what costumes, props, locations?) and some prop making. The final day is filming, and then I spend a session of off-class time preparing the PowerPoint. The first group ended up with a story called “The three bats”, about some cardboard fruit bats and a farmer. That digital story isn’t uploaded yet because we need a parent permission slip for the young student who played the role of the apple farmer in my playground duty hat.

The next week, “Goldilocks and the three bears” was repeated with the other half of that class and we ended up with a prequel to the famous fairy tale, called “Mr E and the Three Bears“, starring our own PE teacher and three toy teddies gather from classrooms. That digital story wasn’t uploaded straight away because I need to check if Mr E was okay with being an Internet celebrity. (We’d taken his photo and made a mask out of it, but he had no idea what we were up to until the PowerPoint was finished!)

This week, I took half of the next class outside to our COLA (Covered Outdoor Learning Area) and we “retold” the new fairy story of the fortnight, “The Ugly Duckling”, again person by person, as a “Circle Time” activity. We once again discussed how the story could be parodied, reversed, extended with a sequel, or whatever. Then they split into three groups and designed one storyboard per group. And so on. This time, we ended up with a story called “The ugly caterpillar” (as linked). That digital story was immediately uploaded because we didn’t need any parent permission slips this time.

The completed PowerPoints seem to work really well. The students read them over and over and over, and the look great on an IWB! Young students have such an economy of words when brainstorming stories – just what you need for this kind of storytelling – and you can see them channeling aspects of other narratives and texts they’ve been exposed to. “The ugly caterpillar” certainly owes a lot to Eric Carle’s “The very hungry caterpillar” picture book, and the Aesop’s fable of “The ants and the grasshopper”.

Digital fables

Taking a break from stocktaking for a moment, I wanted to share some digital stories my Early Stage 1 bloggers made over the last few days. These Kinder students, plus a K-2 Language Support class, have continued coming to the library for their regular PSP literacy sessions – what to do now the book rap is over?! – and we’ve been able to extend their Term 4 class learning about fables. They have enjoyed incorporating ideas from Stage 2’s digital stories, which were support material during the recent Bear and Chook books rap.

As you will see from the two Powerpoints, first we read many versions of each Aesop’s fable, then spent time in the playground with mud-map storyboards, the library toy collection, some hastily-made props, and my trusty iPhone. After I uploaded the photos into Keynote (Mac) templates at home, I converted them to Powerpoint format and brought them back to school on a memory stick. The students then viewed their photos again on the IWB, and then we jointly constructed new text during Circle Time (talking & listening). Then some editing after feedback from other audiences – and uploaded to our school blog site.

The ant & the grasshopper

The hare & the tortoise.

If time allows, we may try to do The lion & the mouse next week. (Update! We did it – click on the title!)

This is my third consecutive year working with Early Stage 1 students on fables. The students who created our first batch on a wiki in 2007 (at penrithpslibrary.pbworks.com still talk about them!


Aesop: biography of a great thinker

On show

On the weekend I updated my Flickr slideshow of highlights of the library’s shoestring renovations.

I also created a more involved PowerPoint presentation, in preparation for an ASLA professional development on Saturday at my school. It’s going to be a little strange showing slides of the shoestring makeover of a wall – on the actual wall that was made over!