Sandra K. Friday
By now, students will have fair amount of experience identifying several principles of storytelling. This might be an opportunity to brainstorm the common elements of the stories they have read and watched in film: a changing character is central to an effective story; many of the stories have lots of details; we learn from whose perspective we are viewing the characters when we know whose voice is telling the story; an effective story has a conflict, a lesson or theme; the stories we have read and viewed all have focused on children or youth who grow up on varying degrees of anxiety that manifest the conflict in the story.
Students will feature children growing up on anxiety in their own stories, choosing from their own life experiences, their observations or fabrications. As they begin to brainstorm their own stories, they can refer to their lists of terms and prompts they have compiled as we have responded to the stories we have read and viewed. They can think about skills a. through h. in
The Greedy Friend
.
The first test of their stories, once they have written out a draft, will be to assess them as they did the other stories they read or viewed, completing a graphic organizer on character change and one on conflict generated by anxiety, and a graphic organizer identifying the lesson or theme in their story, etc. Once they have passed this test, they will lay them out on storyboards, including, along with a sketch, the narrative and dialogue that will appear on each page.
There are many ways to convert storyboards into little books, depending on resources, ambition, and time constraints. This decision I will leave to the teachers. However, in the bibliography I have recommended an excellent book for crafting storybooks. Students will share or present their storybooks to the rest of the class.