Digital Storytelling with 6 year old Kids: Little Elephant and Doctor Monkey

Little Elephant from ozge karaoglu on Vimeo.

This is the “Little Elephant” digital story that was created by my 6 year old students last year. The story is one of the stories of Mini Magic 1 book by Macmillian which my students love listening, retelling and role-playing. There are six stories on the book and they are repetitive stories which make learners retell them easily and in a very short time.

We had created other animated stories in our school, but they were difficult to carry and we needed so many people to involve in the production and it took us a lot of time to finalize the projects. You can watch those animation films on “Daisy and Drago” – “Daisy,Drago and the Magic Wand“. (The first one came in 2nd place in International Children Film Festival and was shown in cinemas during the film festival both in Turkey and abroad.)

We finalized “Little Elephant and Doctor Monkey” project in a week, because we used the very basic things that you need when you want to film something. Children drew the animal puppets,they drew the background.We recorded their voices and they played with puppets while they were making them talk and we filmed them with a camera. We didn’t rehearse it before and filming the story took us only one hour.

So your students can create their own digital stories this way and  their level of English doesn’t matter at all. They can be younger or older, I’m sure our digital native students all have their own stories that they want to tell in their own way of living and learning, it’s the 21st century way…