Visual Scripting With 2 Create A Story

I have been thoroughly impressed with 2 create a story, as you can probably see from the posts I have placed on my blog previously. I love that "Infant News Book" feel about the environment, which probably says something about my age.

I have been using 2 create a story recently with 2 age groups. Year 1 are using it to write "Fantasy Stories", as digital picture books. We are combining the teaching of basic graphic skills with the use of emergent writing, to tell stories from out of this world. I have enabled the full tool set, and we are focussing in on the use of specific graphic tools during each session. During the first session children had to design an alien, and could only use the shape form tols to do this, they were allowed to change colours they used. They then had to work with their partners to draft a sentence or two to describe it. During our second session again the tool choice was limited for the opening part of the session, as the children designed a planet for their alien to live on, but on completion they were introduced to the flood fill tool and spray can to finish the graphic, before again being asked to annotate this with descriptive sentences, involving shape and colour. An excellent resource or starting point on reflection for this activity might have been the picture book "I'm Coming To Get You," by Tony Ross. We had a lot of fun discussing what the sky around the planet might have in it, for example a cresent shaped moon, might have been a banana, the stars and other planets apples, and oranges, and the use of the spray can was used to model how we might achieve this effect. One student suggested the moon might be made of cheese, this lead off on one about how the other planets might be made of butter or bread. Where did butter and cheese come from, perhaps we could have a cow jump over or orbit the moon. We will be moving on to develop the story gradually over the next few sessions, and perhaps next week I should share "I'm coming to get you," as part of the session. The images developed are really helping the students to think about what they want to write, and it is interesting looking at the texts they are developing in response to see how their phonological awareness particularly has developed over the course of the year so far. One chap had worked so hard on his two page story draft I published it to the year 1 community pages on Thursday.

Year 3 will be creating podcasts, about their visits to The SS Great Britain, and as a practice run and drafting tool to introduce the idea of scripting and oral presentation, I have decided to use 2 create a story to develop visual scripts to support rehearsal of the process, by creating a photo supported text about their visit. This will give them the opportunity,

• to create voiceovers to support their written and visual text,
• to explore and discuss the effect that their voice over has on the reader,
• to explore how we use the microphone as an input device,
• and discuss the purpose expression as a device to maintain our reader's attention and interest.

These visual scripts will then be used to inform the chapter structure of the podcast I woul like them to develop in Podium. Each group presentation forming an episode that we can publish on completion to our Podium Webspace.