My Story

One of my biggest struggles this year has been to get my first graders to do their writing. It is like pulling teeth. 

 

My school uses the Daily 5 model for reading instruction for grades one through three; The Daily 5 includes Read to Self, Read to Someone, Listen to Reading, Word Work, and Work on Writing. For Work on Writing, students just write about any topic of their choosing for the allotted time. It's hard for me to think of a topic to write about sometimes, but for first graders? They act like it's impossible. Even when I give a topic (which most of the time I do give a suggestion), they whine and complain and tell me that it's too hard. 

My school is part of a network of schools called the Indian Mission School Network. A foundation called the Better Way Foundation helps fund the network and has asked each school to create a project that tells their "Community Story". These stories can be about anything from culture to language, ceremonies to a history of tribes. The kindergarten, first, and second grades at my school are working together on a project to simply tell about themselves. The kindergarten teacher at school introduced me to this new app to accomplish this called My Story. Students can become authors and create their own books on the iPad. 

For this community story project, each kid is going to make a book using the app. They will tell about themselves, their tribe, where they live and what they want to be when they grow up. Each student has drawn several pictures for their book, which I loaded on their books this weekend.

I just started playing with the app this weekend and it has some pretty cool features. First, the app allows you add as many authors as you want (as far as I can tell). So each student can have their own account. It's also fun because it lets you customize by taking a picture of each kid, so they can see themselves as authors of stories. Once you create an author, you then can add books. This is where the fun part begins. There are many ways to illustrate a story; kids can "draw" on the iPad with brushes of various colors, take pictures of their own surroundings or artwork to put in the book, or select from preloaded stickers and media that are in the app. Kids can add text or write freehand, or they can record their voice telling the story. Once a student is done with the story, a video of sorts is created to display what they've created. There are options to share both the video and the book by email, social media, etc. I think this tool could be really useful for even branding in a classroom. 

I am excited to use this app with my first graders. They are so pumped whenever they get to be on the iPads. I am hoping this will help spice up writing for them and it won't seem as much as a chore.