ExploraStory

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Another week exploring stories, exploring them from the inside and making them up as we go along.  After some books and enegizing songs, we read Move! by Steve Jenkins & Robin Page.  Their books focus on nature and animals illustrated using a ripped paper collage technique.  Move! talks and illustrates the motion of animals, which shows that sometimes very different animals can move in very similar ways.  Whales and polar bears both dive, cheetahs and road runners both run.  We did too!  It was a great story to act out because it was part animal learning, part trivia, and part precursor to many entertaining evenings playing charades.

 We made up some more stories too.  There were princesses, mermaids, more animals and monsters.  This is a good place to mention that one of the underlying concepts to literacy is the ability to understand narration, and that stories have a beginning, a middle and an end.  What we did today in Explorastory isn’t really anything different than what children do so much of all the time: imagining.  The framework that we put the storytelling in gave some structure that strengthens the ability to understand narration.  The stories were told in a group setting, out loud, and had to answere questions like “what happened next?” and “what about the other character, what happened to her?”  In this sense, even though we didn’t ‘make’ anything, we were getting a lot of practice with abilities that get us ready to read, but in a very expressive, kid-centric and reggio mode.