Photo of Kindergarten Storybook from Leanne Windsor

Kindergarten Storybook from Leanne Windsor

By Leanne Windsor

Description

Kindergarten does a year long unit of inquiry on storytelling as part of their PYP programme. We had authors and storytellers come to our school as part of this unit. This VoiceThread displays the illustrations that the children drew with author Alison Lester when she visited our school. We followed the pattern of her picture book series about children and what they are doing day to day. The VoiceThread was a wonderful way to demonstrate the children’s work and also have them identify vocally what their drawing was about.

Assignment

Initially we started with the idea of a paper based book and then decided to digitize it by scanning the children’s art and creating jpg files. We loaded those files into VoiceThread and then had the children comment on their work.

Goals

The main goal was to demonstrate the children’s art work. Secondly we wanted the children to see it come together as a “story” that they could page through and listen to.

Easy Parts

The easiest part of this project was enjoying the finished product.

Challenges

The thing that was most time consuming was scanning the children’s art work! The children were initially a little nervous about recording their voices but soon warmed up to it and had fun.

Tools

Scanner & External microphone for better quality sound.

Tips

This was a very simple project. We could further extend it by having the children comment on each others work.

Variations

VoiceThread is an excellent tool for teaching storytelling and lends itself to all kinds of storytelling scenarios.