Children Creating Multimodal Stories About a Familiar Environment

Abstract

Storytelling is a practice that enables children to apply their literacy skills. This article shares a collaborative literacy strategy devised to enable children to create multimodal stories about their familiar school environment. The strategy uses resources, including the children's own drawings, images from Google Maps, and the Puppet Pals Director's Pass app, to leverage children's experiences in their school and community contexts for a meaningful and authentic literacy learning opportunity. The children use both paper‐based materials and digital technologies to create multimodal stories. The process and work samples are provided to illustrate the strategy in practice.

Mapping young children’s conceptualisations of the images they encounter in their familiar environments

“…The creation of a map text enables children to articulate the extent to which they themselves identify spatial location and context as contributing to the meaning conveyed by an image-based text. Kervin and Mantei (2017) engaged young children in the creation of multimodal map texts which brought together storytelling and their understanding of the known environment of the school. A task was designed for one Australian primary school class, to create their own map of the school using paper and coloured pens, alongside a 2D puppet figure.…”

“…A further key observation from the study may be found in children's use of their 2D puppet character. Kervin and Mantei (2017) suggest that the movement of the puppet characters around the map 'provided concrete spatial resources to prompt children's recall of familiar events and practices' (723). When considering this activity in light of Hackett's (2014) observations of the embodied practices of younger children, the possibility arises that it is these physical engagements which the children in the study are representing and drawing upon to support and convey their own meaning.…”

“…The photography phase was the first point at which I met with the children individually.I explained the task with the help of the picture book 'My Map Book' by Sara Fanelli (2006), as I sought to demonstrate to the children that you could use pictorial representations to record the different things you might find in, or associate with, a particular place. A similar approach to explaining a map-based task is taken by Kervin and Mantei (2017). Debate exists regarding the extent to which children's participation is scaffolded (see Lambert and Clyde, 2000), particularly in relation to visual methods (Clark, 2010).…”

Créer une carte narrative sur Google Maps : étude du raisonnement géographique et de la cohérence textuelle chez les élèves de la 9e année secondaire

“…Il est admis qu'à notre époque le numérique, le visuel et le virtuel prennent une place de plus en plus grande dans la vie de tous les jours (Matusiak, 2011). La technologie numérique permet la création de tâches multimodes : linguistique, audio ou sonore, visuel, spatial et gestuel (Kervin et Mantei, 2017). Dans ce contexte, la littératie est une activité sociale qui se vit quotidiennement dans le temps et l'espace d'une manière continue et transdisciplinaire (Casey, 2013).…”

“…Dans ce sens, si les pratiques de littératie chez les élèves sont socialement situées, il convient de leur offrir des occasions d'apprentissage authentiques et stimulantes (Kervin et Mantei, 2017). Ce contexte, signifiant pour l'apprentissage de la lecture et de l'écriture, est particulièrement important pour les élèves francophones en milieu minoritaire canadien.…”