Lights, Camera, Dinosaur!

As a follow-up to my post about Literacy Playshop, I thought that I would write about my experience putting the playshop into action. I recently had the pleasure of conducting a literacy playshop with a colleague  (Catie) and two kindergarten students (Camden and Ella) at a local elementary school. Catie and I arrived with iPad and art box in hand, ready to get to work--or should I say play?

  Camden and Ella's teacher allowed us to use her office as our playshop space, so that we wouldn't disturb the rest of the class during their Daily Five time. We started out by reading a book together so that the students could settle in and feel comfortable working (playing!) with us. After the book, we explained that we were going to make our own movie together, and it could be about anything we wanted. Immediately, Camden chimed in that he had seen a movie recently. It was about dinosaurs, and he could recount every bit of the plot, starting from the beginning. I asked Ella if she thought we should make our movie about dinosaurs, and she agreed. Catie and I then asked what we should use to make our movie: should we use our bodies to act it out? Should we use toys? Should we make our own dinosaurs? Camden and Ella were excited to make their own dinosaurs, and fetched blank paper to get started.

  I ran into periodic snags during the playshop when attempting to engage Ella in the process. She is a sweet, but very shy child, and is usually hesitant to get involved. When I invited her to join Camden in drawing dinosaurs, she balked. Thinking for a moment, I drew upon a strategy we learned for teaching early literacy: shared writing. Except in this case, I suppose it would be shared drawing (and this is where my training as an artist comes in handy!). I let Ella choose a marker color for our dinosaur, and then started drawing the head. Occasionally I paused and asked, "What comes next?" When Ella supplied the answer, I would hand her the marker and let her fill in that part, and she would hand it back to me. In the end, I drew the head, arms, and body, and Ella draw the eye, tail, and legs. She then colored in the paper dinosaur puppet.

 With setting and characters drawn together, and the plot hashed and re-hashed by Camden, we were ready to get filming. Then we hit snag number two: Ella felt too shy to participate in the puppetry, and no amount of cajoling could convince her to play. I then filled in as the other dinosaur characters with Camden, and Catie filmed the movie with her iPad. Ella did finally agree to be the "button pusher" on the iPad, and we were happy that she accepted a role in our playshop.

  Our finished film shows the elements of movie/story literacy that our students are familiar with: characters, setting, plot, dialogue, sequencing of events, protagonists and antagonists, humor, rising conflict and resolution. When we asked our students if we should name our movie, like writers name books, Camden offered the tile "Eat the Dinosaurs," a play on the title "Meet the Dinosaurs" (he insists this is the movie he watched, though we can't find evidence of its existance).

 Camden and Ella seemed to enjoy engaging in the literacy playshop, as I imagine most children would. Catie and I agreed that we were concerned about the feasibility of having 25 kindergarteners successfully utilizing iPads to film their movies. I can see the literacy playshop model working especially well in late first grade and second grade, when students have longer attention spans and better fine motor skills.

 Finally, how does literacy playshop meet my trifold standards for education?

•  Head: check, showing all the literacy knowledge I listed above
•  Hands: check, lots of moving, touching, and making going on
•  Heart: check, the students enjoyed playing/storying, and were able to incorporate elements from their existing interests.

A triple threat, and something that I envision myself using in my future classroom.

Literacy Playshop

Within the last few weeks I have read an interesting text about integrating play, literacy, and new media in early childhood and primary grades classrooms.  Literacy Playshop is a curricular framework developed by Karen Wohlwend that empowers children to draw upon their existing knowledge of popular media and use that knowledge to create multimedia productions. With a vision of literacy that is becoming increasingly popular amongst education researchers, children are not simply "writing" or "reading" in literacy playshop. A better verb might be "storying"-- developing characters, settings, and plots through the use of drawing, writing, acting, filming, and more. Children in the literacy playshop often start with a narrative or character that they are familiar with from popular media franchises, but with time the story will evolve to include problems and solutions from the child's imagination.

 I will confess that I came to the literacy playshop with some hesitation. Those familiar with Waldorf will know that the philosophy takes a strong position against giving children early access to technology, such as television and computers, and encourages parents to distance their children from popular media franchises. With  characters that seem to be designed more for adults than children, how could I disagree? Take one glance at the cast of Winx Club, a television show popular enough to boast a recent series of Happy Meal toys, to see what I mean:

 Yikes. Pass me the wooden play food, stat.

 Not exactly something I would want my six-year-old daughter emulating. Dr. Wohlwend, though, asserts that banning children from partaking in popular media is a privileged perspective. To be able to offer children alternative toys, one must be able to afford them, and for many families this is not a possibility. She also believes that educators should allow children the opportunity to share their knowledge of popular media franchises within the classroom--children often have deep wells of knowledge about their particular interests (often cartoons, etc), but few chances to express that knowledge. I can't disagree with that, and I do believe that teachers should honor their students' experiences and interests. A child who is struggling in traditional academic areas may be able to speak about his passions with startling depth, if only given the chance.

 At the moment, I am straddling both sides of the popular media fence, but I suppose my stance is this: Parents should be encouraged to be knowledgeable about the content of the media their children engage with, but ultimately the decisions that they make for their children and families are theirs alone. As a teacher, my job is to make sure all of my students feel included and respected. Therefore, I cannot ban popular media items/discussion from my classroom, though I should educate myself about the franchises my students are exploring, as some may not be appropriate for classroom consumption.

What do you think about popular media in the classroom? Have you ever conducted a literacy playshop in your class?