Exploring Story Elements

During November and December, students read a variety of versions of The Three Bears and The Gingerbread Man.  We learned that fictional texts have four main story elements: characters, setting, a problem, and a solution. With these story elements in mind, we began to compare and contrast these different versions.  The children loved being detectives on the search for how stories were similar and different.
In writing, we also focused on having characters and a setting in our own stories, which got this ambitious teacher thinking how cool it would be if we could make our stories come alive and give our characters some action (we also have been learning about verbs!)!
Luckily, there is just the iPad app!  With the help from our Digital Learning Specialist, Mrs. Baker, students learned how to use the ipad to take pictures of their characters and setting that they drew on paper.  Within the Explain Everything app, the children learned how to use a stylus, import and crop a picture, and record audio while moving the characters to tell

their story.

Mrs. Baker and I were extremely impressed with how well the students learned this new app and how smoothly the project went.




The students were surprised and excited to see their stories come to life!


Thank you, Mrs. Baker, for your help!
As you work with your child at home, can he/she identify the characters and setting of a book read aloud to them?
Can your child create and tell you a story that has interesting characters and a setting?  Maybe they would also like to try to include a problem ("What went wrong?") and a solution ("How was the problem fixed?") in their story.