Develop thoughtful and creative reporting skills by encouraging children to observe carefully, reflect on their experiences, and share their perspectives.
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Develop thoughtful and creative reporting skills by encouraging children to observe carefully, reflect on their experiences, and share their perspectives.
Making it Inclusive
Make sure everyone can go on the field trip and discuss with the children how someone, for example, in a wheelchair could participate.
Task 1: Reporting a field trip
Select a field trip and ask children to think of a way to report about the trip to parents. Go on the field trip and help children remember to find and collect things to report (without forcing them and making sure they also enjoy the field trip). Take photos and film little bits of the children's experience (make sure not to leave anyone out).
Back in the classroom collect all material and show the photos and clips and find ways to make a Digital report of the trip for parents. It is important that the kindergarten teacher keeps in mind that sustainability and environmental awareness is at the core of the field trip and highlights elements in the trip that sustain this underlying motivation to promote children's enjoyment of the field trip and the connection to nature. Hopefully the felt joy of the trip will be expressed in the Digital Report reflecting the pedagogical goal.
Task 2: How to tell the story from a different perspective
Select different stories with different animals in it and explore how the story can be told by different perspectives. For example: one could tell the story of Red Riding Hood from the perspective of the hunter, or the perspective of the grandmother, or the perspective of the wolf (see Spanish version of the story told by the wolf for inspiration).
Explore telling the same story from different perspectives and collectively reflect on what changes when different perspectives are taken up. It might be too complex for children to understand how some issues of climate change may not appear from a certain perspective and become impossible to not see when being told by a different perspective, but learning about different perspectives on storytelling is an important step for future awareness of this issue.
Discussion Plan: Stories and how they are told
Are there stories that are told in the whole world in the same way?
Is it hard to tell a story from a different perspective?
Is it funny to think of a story from an animal point of view?
Are some things surprising in the new version of the story?
What do you like best about the story?
What should be in all the perspectives in the story, no matter who tells it?
Can we tell a story from no perspective?
Is it also true when we draw a story?
Are there things that cannot be told from certain perspectives?
Are bits of the story easier to understand when told from a certain perspective?
Task 3: Interactive Storytelling
Encourage children to create a digital storybook about an adventure of one of the small living beings they found in the backyard in Exploring Small Animals in the Kindergarten Backyard, using their macro photos and drawings to enhance their storytelling and digital literacy skill you can use various tools for creating digital storybooks such as Book Creator, Google Slides or Adobe Spark. You can also create a paper-based storybook by printing and gluing the pictures.
Have children select the macro photos they took that best fit their story. If needed, they can take additional photos or draw pictures to illustrate their story.
Use the selected photos and drawings to create a digital storybook. Children can narrate their story and add captions to the images.
Variations
Animals in the wild
Encourage children to create a story about an adventure involving wild animals.
Under the sea
Encourage children to create a story about an adventure involving animals and other living beings under the sea.
Further Ideas
Digital vs. Paper
You can also create a paper-based storybook by printing and gluing the pictures.
Compare and Contrast
Compare and contrast other activities along the dividing line between digital and paper.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
