Sonic Pics-Digital Story Telling

Our class was successful with our first round of digital story telling with Story Kit.  After much "play" time Mr. Mark and I have chosen Sonic Pics which costs $2.99.  One of the important parts for me is that I continue to reinforce the writing process either on paper or with their iPods. Our class will be competing their Persuasive writing Tuesday and then they are going to create a digit story with their hot topics.

So let me start from the beginning, after sharing numerous mentor texts and examples of different Persuasive Writing, the students had to choose one HOT topic and their position on the topic:

1)  Should the driving age change to 18?
2)  Should there be required reading for 30 minutes 5 nights a week?.
3)  Why do teachers assign homework?
4)  Playing outside the first 15 min. then eat lunch (this would switch our current schedule)

After the students made their final decision, we charted their decisions so they could help each other.  Next we focused on writing strong leads.  This I have to admit blew my lesson plans out of the water for two days, I had to do extensive re-teaching but now they finally got it!  We then focused on the body of the writing introducing: simple, compound, and complex sentences.  Finally we worked and discussed strong closings.

Goals for  Sonic Pics:

1)  This one I believe is the most important having the students choose the MOST important support from their topic.  I believe this will be a difficult lesson for my students because they will have to focus on reading differently. Honestly at this point, most of my students believe every sentence is important but I am going to ask them to discern which ones are THE most important.

2) After the students have chosen their key points, they will type them into Sonic Pics and will add pictures, graphs, data to support their statements.

3)  Finally the students will do a voice over and present their digit story to the class.

Check back later to see how our journey into Digital Storytelling goes....here we go again and I am excited!