Teaching with Storyboards

The next few posts are going to be about something I like to call storyboards. If you've ever heard of a storyboard, it was probably in the context of a movie or television show. Creators of media use storyboards to organize their thoughts and plan out scenes. It's basically an organizational tool. In our homeschool, a storyboard is a fun, creative way to retell a story. 

Since kindergarten focuses mostly on reading and writing skills, storyboards are a great way to teach a child how to retell a story. Older kids normally get stuck with this task in the form of a regurgitated book report. I know many kindergarten classrooms have the students orally retell the story or draw a picture of their favorite scene. With our storyboards, we retell the entire story with drawings, cut-outs, pictures and more. All of these items are put onto the larger-sized index cards. We recently just finished our first storyboard. Since this is a brand new experiment for us, and I couldn't find too much online about creating storyboards like this, our stories will probably improve over time. 

I will be posting about the storyboard process over the next few days. I'd love to hear feedback and any suggestions you may have about creating and implementing storyboards. We're doing our presentation tonight,  so I will have step-by-step pictures posted, too. If you'd like to take part in a storyboard with your homeschoolers, pick up some large-sized index cards, crayons, glue, felt, and anything else you think you might need. We chose " If You Give a Moose a Muffin" for our first storyboard, so I also printed out clipart from Word that related to the story. Look for more postings this week to follow the storyboard process.