Digital Story Telling

Kids love story telling and making up class books.  Our class books are the favorite books in the room.  They read them again and again and AGAIN.  I have now taken that next step in story telling.

We made our own "version" of the 3 Billy Goats Gruff.  Here is what we did...

We read at least 5 different variations for the story line of the 3 Billy Goats Gruff.  My darlings know the story inside and out by the time we are done... So well they can't go across a bridge with out 'trip-trapping' across.

We do the normal teacher stuff like compare and contrast, acting and retelling, making list, learning rare and juice new words, writing story extenders, adding words to the word wall, story props, exploring our voice as a troll and so on...

Usually the next step is a class book.  Well here was the "new" way...

I supported the story line and let them have creative control over the number of goats, what their names were, where they were going, the sound the goats made and what the characters would say.  WOW did they come up with something...

I wrote down all of the facts and typed up the story.  I read it to them to see if we needed any changes and they were like any good publisher, they did.  Once we fixed it up we were ready to record our voices.  They are the Billy Goat Ice Cream Head's and the Troll's voice.  I used my iPhone to capture their voices at school.  Getting little ones to say something at the same time is easy unless you need to record...

Next we worked on the pictures.  We painted, cut, glued and made a mess!  But it was fun!





Then came the hard part...putting it all together.  I used my iPhone, Windows Movie Maker, ScrapBlog.com to make it sooo cute and time...

It took about 3 hours to put it all together and I am hoping next time only 1!  But the look on their faces when it was all done was worth every minute.  We watched it maybe 20 times and we would watch it more if we had time. 

Here it is...enjoy.