I’ve been working with 8-10 year olds trying out the new Primary Framework literacy/narrative/film strand. The suggested and provided film resource “The Piano” http://tinyurl.com/66r4n2 is a powerful narrative animation to an evocative piano accompaniment.

We have immersed ourselves in this over three weeks and it has been a rich experience. We captured a set of images and first used Voicethreads to explore initial thoughts, then emotions associated with the different parts of the story. We moved on to annotate the images in PowerPoint and then used PhotoStory 3 to recreate their own versions of the narrative. (We have found that many of the children are quite shy doing voice recordings so we are planning to focus more on this after half term.)

We realised that the power of the images in this narrative setting was that the emotional context provided by the images and sound allowed the children to create their own narrative in quite a complex but original way. A common writing task based on a class book for example might use the plot as a starting point, drawing on their own experiences. With six images they were able to build and elaborate their versions, playing with the plot, with time and with characterisation. This is still work in progress but a couple of the children did blog about it, see http://leia.shepeaustow.net/2008/05/06/the-piano/ and http://connor.shepeaustow.net/2008/05/08/the-piano/.