Tuesday, November 9, 2010

If You Give a Moose a Muffin Storyboard Activity Part II

Here's the update on the Teaching with Storyboards post from last week. Like I stated before, we chose If You Give a Moose a Muffin for our first ever storyboard. This blog post will cover the process, and I'll post tomorrow about the presentation of the storyboard.

Getting Started
To begin, we read the story for one week every day.  I helped her start to memorize the story so she could retell it using her storyboards. After she had the story pretty much memorized, we began working on our storyboards.

Materials
Large index cards
crayons
glue
felt
material (we used an old shirt that no longer fit---you get lots of neat prints and fabrics this way)
printed clip art that related to story (for this I printed out moose, muffins, and a blackberry bush piece)
magazine cutouts
button, thread, and needle

Process


We started by adding the title to an index card with some clipart for illustrations



These storyboards illustrate the part in the story where you go to the fridge to get some of your mother's homemade blackberry jam and the moose asks for another and another muffin.


So you have to go to the store to get some, but he wants to go with you. But since it's cold, he'll ask for a sweater. We used red felt to cut out the sweater. For the part where he notices a button is loose, I cut out another red sweater and loosely sewed a purple button onto the sweater before she glued it on the moose.

This is her illustration for the part where the button reminds him of sock puppets so he gets scissors, glue, string etc... to make some.

The next few storyboards skip ahead in the story, to the part after you help him make scenery for a puppet show and he needs to hide his ears under a sheet.

This was one of her favorite boards to make. Using the clipart of the moose, which we also used on the title page, we found a picture of a ghost in a magazine and recreated the part where he puts the sheet over his head, which reminds him that he wants to be a ghost for Halloween. Using little magazine letters, we spelled out the word Boo!...the colors everywhere illustrate the fact that he scared himself and spilled the paint everywhere.
This illustrates the part where you get a sheet from your bed for the moose. We cut up an old, patterned t-shirt that didn't fit her anymore to act as the sheet on the bed.

This is one of the last scenes in the storyboard. She drew the moose going to hang up the sheet after he used it to clean up the paints. The clipart is supposed to be the mother's blackberry bushes in the yard. The last page simply had a drawing of the moose with a clipart of the muffin with the words, "And chances are...."


 As you can see, there isn't a lot of writing with these storyboards. My point wasn't to have her copy the story onto the cards, but use her imagination to retell the story. We focused on 2-3 cards per day, and it took us almost 2 weeks to complete the entire thing. We would read the story as we created the boards, and she would draw the storyboards in relation to how she remembered chunks of the story. So one card may represent 3 pages in the story, while another might simply be 1 page. There are no set in stone rules. The storyboards I didn't include in this blog were simply hand-drawn. I tried to lead her to more creative ways to express the story, but she is very much into drawing her own pictures right now, so that's mostly what we went with.

Since these are time-consuming projects, I only have 1 planned a month. We are thinking of doing If You Give a Cat a Cupcake this month, but she's still deciding which book she wants. Tomorrow I will post a short blog post on how we presented this story to the rest of the family and saw the whole thing come together in a cute little presentation. Happy homeschooling!










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