brainstorm

The Kindergarten students are starting a new unit called Let’s Use Our Imagination. We began the unit in ICL class with a hook. The students visited the National Gallery of Arts Kids Art Zone site to try some interactive creation tools. We learned a little about the artist Henri Rousseau, primarily how he used his imagination to paint jungle scenes. The students then used the interactive tool to create their jungle scenes.

Rousseau

A second tool in the NGA site for using imagination to engage creativity is the Sea Saws. The students choose from a variety of digital pieces of wood, shells, stones, sea glass and other objects to piece together a work of art.

Sea Saws

We are now moving into the story creation process with the goal for each student to create a screencast story. The first lesson was to brainstorm using the iPad’s Popplet Lite mind mapping app. Popplet is a super app for storyboarding, as one can draw pictures and text to reorder the “popplets” around the screen. The Kindergarten students took to it very quickly as I challenged them to think about three or more possible topics they would like to create a story about. As they are not literate, seeing them use their minds to think visually with their story ideas is fantastic. See one example of a student brainstorming at the top of the post and one below.

brainstorm

In next week’s lesson, the students will again use Popplet to choose their story topic to then storyboard each page of their upcoming digital story. They will draw simple sketches to depict what is happening at each stage of their story. We will then use one of the art apps to draw the illustrations for each page of their screencast. The Kindergarteners are adept at drawing on the iPads.

The last stage of the project will be when the students insert each of their illustrations into the Educreations screencasting app. They will then record in Spanish or French what is happening with each image to tell their digital story.

Image Sources