The Travelling Marveller: On the Wings of Imagination

One of the greatest joys that I experience in my career, are those moments when I can capture children's imagination and encourage them to create using their sense of wonderment. As I watch tamariki become immersed in a state of awe I cannot but share in the moment, too. Those moments are the ones I savour the most, and it's what inspires me to make them happen more and more frequently. A sense of wonderment and awe inevitably lead to 'flow.'

Well, this week one of those moments broke into our classroom like a rainbow and deposited gold. Writing gold.

I'd been wanting to find a rich context for the children to create stories that we could publish using Explain Everything. This is a new app for our class, so I need to get them to use it in different ways to become confident and proficient with the many features. So far, we'd only used it once to collaboratively retell the legend of 'Maui and the Sun,' and the ICT focus was to use the slides with drawing and photo tools while mapping out the legend.

My next goal was to get them to create their own story, and to practise listening to how their writing sounds when read out loud while learning how to edit the sound track as needed. This would frame the digital component as a tool to enhance their product as well as give them direct feedback on the level of details they have and where to go to next. As emergent writers, developing ideas with more complex vocabulary is a crucial next step. Another bonus is that by listening to themselves read, punctuation comes alive.

But the context had to be special. Conquering the challenges of having to re-record again and again while navigating a new tool requires drive and urgency to persevere through it all. Context is the bedrock of flow, for without context learning has no purpose or meaning. Creating persistence in these kind of tasks for six year olds in no mean feat.

Alas, in flew the Tiny Dragon from the Literacy Shed, a veritable library of inspiration. We are moving towards character descriptions and I wanted something so juicy that their imaginations would explode with descriptive words and ideas.

Itty-bitty Tiny Dragon had us spellbound: "Imagine if you had a dragon so tiny that you could fit it into your pocket." With that imagery eyes popped open and mouths hang on every word as the untold possibilities opened the door to that marvellous place we love as children. Hooked.

(Source: http://www.literacyshed.com/the-images-shed.html)

We used think-pair-share to workshop our ideas which flowed like cascades of words on the mat. They were so ready to write! After some brief sentence level modelling, pencils danced as ideas unfurled onto the pages and their tiny dragons sprung to life. Once finished, they drew their dragons so they could use this as the background on the app. Pair sharing helped with editing, and re-reading before recording prompted more self-correction.

Those that finished first helped others to record and the more confident supported the novices. Collaboration and imagination allowed the task to be fairly student led and I barely had to help with re-editing the sound, besides, at this stage we want mistakes to learn from! The use of digital tools and literacy learning took us beyond using digital tools as a Substitution into Redefinition (R, Puentedura, Building upon SAMR).

And so their tiny dragons have come to life in our first digital book of stories for our class blog. We have reflected and some have decided to re-record to get it 'just right.'

Here are a few of their first digital stories, each joyously created from a child's heart.

...and why a rich context is so valuable.

Every Friday morning we have a 1.5 hr slot of Discovery Time. This is a time for the children to find out, try out, discover and create through play while we have a Key Competency or 21st Century Skill focus, or both. There is a set of activities that the children chose from or stations.

To honour student voice, I ask them for suggestions and ideas for contexts and add these to the mix of optional activities. This week we had three options (guess the most popular one!):

- Turn a story into a play and act it out.
- Create a tiny home for your tiny dragon.
- Create a marble run or marble maze.

The 'learning focus' was problem solving as we begin to explore the skills that we will need to hack the classroom.

Thanks to the wonderful PD from Kath Murdoch I now frame every learning intention as a question:

We brainstormed ideas before (photo), during and after the session so we now have a set of indicators for problem solving to test and work with when we begin to analyse and evaluate how the systems in our classroom are working. Learning through play is real, meaningful and authentic no matter the age of students.