Monday, April 4, 2011

Little Bird Tales

As a first grade teacher, I try to have my students read and write as much as possible. I just wrapped up a big writing unit on fiction stories. Each student was asked to pick a picture from a variety of choices. From the picture of their choosing, we worked on identifying story elements, the importance of each element, and from there built a fiction story. This process took weeks to complete. Yesterday, 1B "published" their stories and shared them with the whole class.  To know that 6 and 7 year olds created lengthy stories that had "meat", "substance," and depth was a big success in my book. However, the technology portion was missing from this unit and that bothered me. (Now and in the future, most students are and will be creating new content on the web. This is something I feel students in my first grade class should get  familiar and comfortable with.)

In EPSY 556, someone mentioned "Little Bird Tales."(http://littlebirdtales.com/)  I hadn't heard of it before and it made me curious to find out more.  I must confess that I did a little happy dance to find out that my students would definitely be motivated and excited to try out this story building website.  I have all of the technology available at school and/or home to help make creating new content on the web a reality in my classroom!  This is something that I believe my students can comprehend and just dig in with once I have shown them how to use the "mechanics" of the website through my Smartboard.  I am very excited to get started using this website in my classroom.  Most of all, I would love any suggestions, tips, and advice if you have used this website before to help or guide me in this new "story building" journey.  

I will post more as I try this out in the next weeks to let you know how it goes.  :)

1 comment:

  1. We love to hear about happy dances over over our website! We hope you and your students enjoy using Little Bird Tales and that it really helps engage them in the storytelling and idea sharing process. If you have any suggestions, questions or issues, don't hesitate to contact us at support@littlebirdtales.com

    And thanks for blogging about our site, too!

    Amiee and Mike Klem
    Founders of LittleBirdTales.com

    ReplyDelete