Story Sequencing with Animated Film

(Originally posted February 18, 2015 on Greenwood 50's Technology Leaders and Coaches in Action! at: http://kidblog.org/stls/823673c8-64ee-4e47-81b0-aca3e1d5b807/story-sequencing-with-animated-film/ )
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Story sequencing and retelling stories typically requires little more than a great book and a willing audience.  But when you have a goal of incorporating instructional technologies in your library lesson plans in order to model technology integration, it requires a little bit more.



For the past few weeks I've worked with kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd grades on a story sequencing unit.  We started the unit with a basic, technology free lesson, that included reading a story together and having students retell the story, putting the events in order.  After that initial lesson, I wanted to use technology to reinforce what they had learned by introducing different ways of sequencing events and different types of stories to sequence.  I did so by using animated short film.  Not only animated short film, but animated short film without dialogue.  My question to them was: can we sequence a story without any words that isn't even a book?  They were intrigued.

I used PreziEdu to create a presentation outlining story sequencing and embedding the short animated film Gopher Broke by Jeff Fowler.  The short film is perfectly engaging to students because of it's humor.  Without dialogue, it presents repetitive action that is easily understood and sequenced for retelling by students.  Through the Prezi, we discussed story sequencing and whether or not stories could be sequenced if they did not have words or dialogue.

After watching the film, students worked cooperatively as a class to sequence the events of the story by choosing screenshots to put the action and events of the story in order. Afterwards, we looked at the screenshots in their correct order and determined the beginning, middle, and end of the story and that even though it had no words or dialogue and was a film and not a book, the events could still be sequenced and retold based on that sequence.

Once the Prezi part of the lesson was complete, students were dismissed into the library where they used iPads and the Dog and Bone app to practice story sequencing.

 

Dog and Bone is a free app that uses an interactive fable the user can either read or have read to them by touching the text.  Once they have read or listened to the story, there is a sequencing game and a sequencing quiz that gives them interactive activities to practice sequencing.

 

Overall, this unit of study on story sequencing used presentation and interactive practice technologies to reinforce learning.  Students were engaged by the presentation and the animated film and also by the interactive Dog and Bone app, which allowed them to read a story themselves and use what they had learned to order/sequence the events on their own.

 

This was an entertaining, interactive, technology infused lesson I will definitely use again!