St. Patrick's Day Writing from First Grade iPad Authors

Are you as excited for St. Patrick’s Day as the creative First Grade Authors in Mrs. Willis’s class are?

Students personalized the leprechaun character in their stories with Toontastic 3D

Follow one leprechaun’s adventures in O’Neill as he searches for the pot of gold on St. Patrick’s Day.  

Skills addressed:

• Creative writing
• Oral reading fluency
• Story elements  (setting, characters, beginning, middle, and end)
• Local community history and traditions (O’Neill St. Patrick’s Day Celebration)
• iPad skills 

iPad apps utilized:

• Toontastic 3D (free)
• Book Creator (Lite version is free)

Our process included brainstorming ideas and writing the stories on paper with Mrs. Willis. When Mrs. Morrow worked with us on the iPads we created the setting and characters for our stories and recorded the animations with the Toontastic 3D app. Then each student created their own Book Creator project and designed their pages by adding the typed text of their story, their Toontastic animation, additional illustrations, and of course, their signature. Each student’s individual Book Creator pages were Airdropped to Mrs. Morrow’s iPad to be combined into one class book. Students brainstormed the facts for the ‘Did You Know?’ pages in between each of the leprechaun’s adventures. Finally, we filmed the conclusion for the book all together and added it to the last page of our Book Creator project. 

So, how can you experience this creative story? 

Luckily, you have three options. 

1. If you have an iPad or a Mac, download the free iBooks app. 

Use your Apple ID to download a free copy of the book and then read in iBooks. 

*This is the most fully functional version of the product. You can swipe to turn the pages and click on the videos to play within the story. 

View in iBooks: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id1216353000 

2.  If you do not have an iPad, but have another type of digital device, you can “read” the whole story as a video on YouTube. 

The video of the whole book is over 18 minutes long, but you can easily skip around to find your favorite parts.  

*TIP: Be sure to watch the ending of the story, no matter what! It starts around 17:44

3.  A final option would be to stop in the 1st Grade classroom and read the book there. We will have a printed version on paper (minus the student voices and videos) as well as being able to view on the school iPads. 

Happy St. Patrick’s Day from some amazingly creative iPad authors!

"Stepping" through Story Arcs with Shoe Stories

Learning about story arc and then applying each story element to our own writing.   

This was the goal for a recent technology-infused creative writing lesson with 4th graders.  This lesson is simple to replicate and adapt to a variety of educational purposes.  Here is how we worked through the process:

1. Introduce the topic of a "dream shoe" to the students. Allow students to design their own sneaker using the printable from Quivervision. *Disclaimer: The printable and the Quiver app are both free. But in order to scan the shoe, you have buy an in-app purchase of $2.99 to unlock the Quiver Vol. 1 set.  Other printables from Quivervision that ARE free would work just as well, including "Dot Day" to accompany the Peter Reynolds' book The Dot.
2. Read "Those Shoes" by Maribeth Boelts out loud. 

3. Use the Quiver app to scan student shoe creations and watch them come to life. 

4. Project the Toontastic app for the class to see and use the introductory media in the app to learn about story elements and the story arc. 

5. Discuss the story arc/story elements that exist in "Those Shoes."  Optional: Students could use these planning pages to reinforce discussion. 

6. Challenge students to use their own creative ideas to come up with a setting for their shoe, a character name, a conflict, a challenge(rising action), a climax, and a resolution/solution.These are meant to be short shoe adventures, so encourage brevity! 

7. Next, using their story elements plan, students draft their shoe story on the drafting pages. 

8. Now students create their shoe "character" and their scene backgrounds in the ToonTastic app in order to bring their adventure to life.  Students can create their shoe and or setting(s) by:

• Taking an iPad photo of their coloring page
• Drawing a shoe with the built-in drawing tools in Toontastic
• Use a character template in Toontastic and add features (a car can be surprisingly similar to a shoe!)

 9. Students should add an audio recording from their story draft pages at each stage of the story arc.  Adding narration is what truly brings the story to life! Also possible is the choice of adding background music as well. 

10. To complete the project, students save the finished Shoe Stories to the camera roll. They can either Airplay the final product for the whole class to view, Airdrop to a teacher's iPad, or share in a gallery-type format where students rotate around to watch each other's stories.