A good project is one which gives students an opportunity to learn in all possible ways. At fundamentals we believe that learning, just like life, doesn't wait for lesson plans and worksheets, but happens when we are trying to find solutions for problems.
Recently, we started these story planning projects with most of our children. Ruchi has made this really creative and amazing "Plan Your Own Story" module which will help children to learn to write, edit, read, visualize, dramatize- all at the same time. During the process, the children will choose their own story elements, plan their stories, dramatize them by writing scene scripts and then showcase their work with short puppet plays.
Besides learning how to apply grammatical concepts such as punctuation, tenses and sentence structures, this concept is helping our students in three ways.
Firstly, since everything is being decided by children they feel that it's their personal project; and so, they are doing it with a lot of enthusiasm. This enthusiasm is naturally leading them to a self imposed discipline and a careful planning of their efforts which is hard to achieve otherwise.
Secondly, the finished product of their work is a work of public display. This is not only helping them in developing their presentation skills, but is also teaching them the importance of readability of their own stories.
The students will eventually learn to ask questions such as:
1. Is my story good enough to be told?
2. Will the audience find it interesting?
3. Do I have a flow in my storytelling?
4. Do I understand the elements of a story well?
5. How can I make it better?
These questions are useful not only when a story is being written, but also when a story is being read. Once students have learned about the importance of these questions, analyzing a story written by someone else will come more naturally to them. This kind of analysis, in turn, will make them better readers.
Thirdly, and more importantly, this project teaches children to work collaboratively. This means working on something together, going beyond personal likes and dislikes and then making something word. They learn to hold discussions based on reasoning and logic, shed their personal prejudices and try to find solutions that are best for the project. This is an important quality which will come in handy when they will go out in the real world.
But the most important aspect of all this is the fun the students are having while planning and writing these stories. It's this fun part that makes our work of steering them in the right direction much easier.
Till next time...
Tanushree
