"Plotting" Right Along...

Whew, January just seemed to fly right by, as did our month-long reading unit, featuring the study of story plots. And who better to help students with that than world-renown British children's author Roald Dahl, whose lifetime wealth of work includes the following title selections: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Fantastic Mr. Fox, George's Marvelous Medicine, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, The BFG, The Twits, and The Witches. All read and enjoyed by our third-grade students throughout the month in conjunction with their examination of the five elements of plot itself--exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and solution.

Once familiar with these core principles and how they actually pertained to the works of a master storyteller such as Dahl--who lays claim to over 200 million copies in print--students were then asked to apply their own knowldege of plot in another way. Using "Google Search", each student was asked to find images that represented all five of the aforementioned components of plot. After locating all of the needed visualizations, students then chose between one of two apps--Animoto or Adobe--to create individual plot videos.