In my last album, Using GarageBand with Children's Books, I shared how students chose a page of the Rocket Book and created music in GarageBand to go along with a selected page in The Rocket Book. Students looked at the action going on on the page and then composed music in GarageBand that would match the action.

For this project, Creating Virtual Storybooks, students went a step further. They observed, reflected and asked questions about several pages of The Rocket Book, noticing the written work, the rhyming and how the artwork worked with the story. They also did a similar activity with a portion of a fairytale in Modern Fairy Tales. In addition, we looked at a few other popular storybooks of today like Goodnight Moon, and Clifford the Big Red Dog. They noticed and we discussed the simplified language that would be used for younger students and that each group would have to decide what age to write their stories for.

Students were then put in groups of 3-4 and were asked to create their own storybooks. One person was in charge of the writing, another in charge of the art, and another in charge of the music. They wrote the story together, with the person in charge of the writing having the final say if there were opposing views that couldn't be worked out. The same went for the art and music. In groups of 4, some students had 2 people be jointly in charge art or music. I had given students a survey prior to starting the project about their art, music and writing preferences, so most students had their first choice and only a few had their second choice.

The students worked collaboratively in the small groups, while social distancing, and had fun problem-solving ways to make the character look the same, for instance, when there were 2 artists in a group of 4, or figuring out what the person who was in charge of writing would do once the story was finished. It was amazing to see them working together, problem-solving to create their projects! The music was created in GarageBand, the art in ibis Paint X, and then the completed works were put into iMovie by the students.

Once completed, our middle school students shared their works with the lower school and early childhood students via Google Meets. The kids loved the stories! When I switched back to the lower school cohort this trimester, the kids asked if they could watch more of the stories during their lunch and snack breaks.

Please check out the virtual storybook created by one of our 8th-grade groups, called A Rabbit's Tale, by Sarah, Sophie, Silas, and Joey! We should be posting all of the stories to our school website at The Independent Day School soon!

  Art/Music    English/Language Arts    Technology    ibis Paint X    GarageBand    iMovie    Children's Books    6 - 8