Success for Boys Website- Story Starters

Success for Boys is about taking steps to ensure all boys are engaged and achieving in their learning. The Ministry of Education is focused on lifting the engagement and achievement of all young people. This site is designed to help you as school leaders and teachers to look at the teaching-learning relationships with boys in your classrooms, create supportive learning environments for boys, and access a range of approaches and tools to address the diverse learning needs of boys so they achieve to their full potential.

Story Starters is a video resource aimed at engaging boys and inspiring them to write. It has been developed for boys in years 5 to 8, using boys of that age to help create the material. Its main purpose is to kick-start boys’ engagement with writing and be part of a range of tools teachers use to reduce the number of boys who are disengaged or not achieving to their potential in writing.

The opening sentences from the role models were taken to schools in Wellington, with groups of boys in years 5 to 8 developing them into stories. The boys provided a huge range of creative, descriptive, inventive and funny ideas, which a scriptwriter took and crafted into eight stories. These stories were developed into fast-paced, modern and entertaining animated videos.

http://success-for-boys.tki.org.nz/Teaching-learning-resources/Story-Starters

Write About This- Pinterest

You know I like Write About This and they recently tweeted that they are storing writing prompts in Pinterest. What a great idea!

AR Dinosaur

This week we had lots of fun taking dinosaur photos of ourselves using the iPad app AR Dinopark. You get the app for free but you have to pay $1.29 for each extra dinosaur!

Here is a slideshow of our images - set to some scary dinosaur music using my favourite slideshow app- Photopeach.

Here are some of the short stories inspired by the dinosaur images...

My favourite dino is the velociraptor. They are big and ferocious. They are meat eaters and have sharp teeth.

The famous dinosaur hunter got a phone call in 1914 about a triceratops in the Chinese jungle so he went out in his camouflage truck and began his search. Four hours later he began to hear a loud roar so he was close to it. He was actually scared.

1982. Me and my two brothers were out hunting in the jungle. We had just caught a 150 pound boar. It attracted a pack of velociraptors. Me and my brothers were fighting for our lives. One survived the fight but my brothers were killed by the vicious velociraptor so I fought that last one with my bare hands and killed it. "That's for my brothers. You beast!!!"

This was a great last day of the term activity and I really would have liked to have spent more time talking about how to compose the snapshots to make them look realistic. Forty minutes seems long enough but by the time we round up the forgetters, sort their flat iPads, set up the lesson, compose the images and do some writing the time is all gone. I am wondering if we need longer next term.

I gave the boys a short survey for the end of term which took time in this session too. I asked the boys what they learnt about learning this term. I was impressed with some of their answers. If they really did learn never to give up then that was the best thing!!!

What have you learnt about learning this term?

• writing faster
• writing about ourselves,
• how to use apps
• sharing things
• never give up
• to have fun
• write with describing words

I also asked what they might change next term. Apart from one who wanted hamburgers instead of Subway lunches here are some other suggestions...

What would you change for next term?

• more games
• more hunting and fishing stories
• more people
• sharing more
• happy- I would change nothing!
• once finished you get free time on the iPad
• write longer stories on the laptops too
• to make a movie on the iPad

I was unhappy to note that when I asked who they had shared their learning with most just said me, a couple said their parents and a couple said their peers.

Next term I want to really push getting that authentic audience- to let the boys know that people a re reading their writing.

Using Aurasma and String Augmented Reality Apps as a prompt for writing.

I put a link here to Daveyhulme School blog post about combining Aurasma and String as a prompt for writing and I don't want to forget to have a go at it. I reckon it would be great to have some physical places the boys could go to see their work. QR Codes and Aurasma seem the obvious choice.

http://mrparkinsonict.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/using-augmented-reality-to-inspire.html

Aliens in the Classroom!

Using the App String, children were able to scan a picture and see an alien moving around the classroom - an amazing WOW moment! String is a AR showcase app, there are plenty on the app store and they really inspire some great writing opportunities. To see examples of this - click here.

Tips for Young Writers

I found this from Ralph Fletcher...

I’m not a big believer in “story starters”. I believe that the best ideas are living inside you. Your challenge is to dig them out. Do the writing only you can do. But every writer gets stuck from time to time so I’ve included a few ideas to jump-start your imagination. You might try to write about:

• Family story
• A particular tradition in your family.
• An artifact (arrowhead, ring, antique, etc.). Important objects in our lives often provide excellent material to write about.
• Special place: special room, attic nook, inside of a tree, scary closet. You might start by quickly sketching a map of a house full of memories. Mark those rooms where something important  happened to you.
• Brother, sister, or special relative. Remember: think small. Focus on one aspect of that person, or one experience you had with him or her.
• Your place in the family. Are the oldest kid in your family? The youngest? Are you a middle child? An only child? Were you adopted?
• Best friend. (Did you ever get in trouble?)
• Moving. Did you leave behind a best friend when you moved from your old house?
• A disastrous time you had at camp or on a family vacation.
• Horrible haircut (or other mortifying experience)
• An injury. Did you ever have to go to the hospital
• Important first: your first day in school, the first time you rode a two-wheeler, etc.
• Favorite pet, or a pet you once had.
• When your family changed: your brother went off to college, grandma came to live with you, etc.
• What you are (or used to be) afraid of.
• One thing you never want to do again!