#KFkinders Present The Gingerbread Man on Green Screen

Hello All!  I am  so excited to share #KFkinders latest MakerSpace production.  We combined our learning of story elements like setting, characters, and important events and learned how to use the green screen app, DoInk, to make a green screen production using The Gingerbread Man.

#KFkinders were busy using a story board to outline the 3 most important settings.  We decided that the kitchen at the beginning of the story has important because it is where we meet 2 of the main characters, the old woman and the gingerbread man.  Then we decided that the most important setting for the middle of the story was the path that the gingerbread man ran away from the house on.  At the end of the story it is important that the gingerbread man runs to the river and needs help across it.  This is where we meet the third main character, the fox.

We spent a lot of time in the classroom, during our workstations, and during writer's workshop retelling The Gingerbread Man.  Retelling the events in a story is a really hard skill for kinders.  We used graphic organizers, re-read gingerbread man stories, watched gingerbread man videos on YouTube, and practiced retelling the story with our partners.  When kinders can retell the story, it shows us that they are able to visualize a story and comprehend what is happening.  This is a very mature skill for readers to be practicing.  Try practicing retelling familiar stories at home with your #KFkinders as a way to go deeper with their comprehension and reading skills.

Click on THIS LINK to watch the video of us using YouTube to retell our story!

After we outlined the important events, settings, and characters we took our learning to the MakerSpace and enlisted Mrs. Bear to help!  In the MakerSpace we made our own puppets using different supplies.  One thing that we really had to be mindful of was we could not use green on our puppets.  When you use a green screen, anything that is the color green will blend into the background.  This was hard for us to remember and caused us to make some redesigns with our puppets.  Another element to making our puppets was we had to work together with our partner to decide how we wanted each character to look.  Taking turns, collaborating on ideas, and using caring language is something that needs to be practiced in a structured environment before we can expect kinders to master the skill.  Check out these picture of  us making our puppets!

The last bit of learning was to use the green screen app, DoInk. We used the setting pictures that each kinder group drew for their backgrounds.  When it was time to record, we had to really work on making our voices match the characters.  This made hearing our voices hard.  Next time we do a green screen production,, we know we need to be LOUDER!!!

This is what the DoInk app looks like in the ap store.

HERE IS A LINK for a great informational video to outline what DoInk can do and how to use it.

After we were done with our green screen production, we introduced a maker challenge to change the ending of our story.  Changing the ending of the familiar Gingerbread Man tales forced #KFkinders to really think of the purpose of the events and characters in the story.

To start the maker challenge, I posed a question for them...

Why did the gingerbread man want to cross the river?

This question generated great dialogue between #KFkinders revolving around the gingerbread man's motivation to get away from the little old woman.  So the next question that presented the group was...

Was the fox trustworthy?

As you can imagine, this got them all talking about how bad the fox was and his only motivation to help was so he could eat the gingerbread man.  So now we have outlined the problem...

The gingerbread man needs to cross the river, but doesn't want to trust the fox.  What else could the gingerbread use to cross the river?

With this question the #KFkinders worked in pairs to find a solution for the gingerbread man.  We had a river (blue paper) for each group to use and they got to choose from various supplies found in the MakerSpace (legos, cardboard, glue, blocks, straws, string, etc.) to build with.  You can see from the pictures below that our "solutions" varied.  We had some groups build a bridge, some built a boat, others got more creative!

We even hosted a learning team from Keokuk School District to  show them what we do in our MakerSpace!

Here are some interviews during our MakerSpace challenge!  Listen to how we problem solve, reflect, tweak, and collaborate!

   Kaleb and PaytenJackson and Lauren

Brock and Maggie

Kole and Grayce   

Elizabeth and Leah

Roman and Tripp   

Olivia and Maliah 

After we were done with the challenge, we talked about how using our solutions from the maker challenge would change the story completely.  We then spent some time retelling The Gingerbread Man using our new endings! 

Please enjoy our videos and our green screen production on our retelling of The Gingerbread Man!  We want to continue using our green screen at school to put together different projects but wanted to share our journey from start to finish!

  Lauren and Jackson Maggie and Brock   

 Roman and Tripp     

 Kole and Paetyn      

                          Grayce and Sterling

Kaleb and Payten    

Leah and Elizabeth  

Olivia and Maliah    

#KFkinders Tackle Informational Reports

Writing is a hard process for kinders to master.  When they begin their kindergarten journey, they have limited independence with writing self-composed pieces.  If beginning kinders can write their name when they come into Kinderland, that is amazing!  Now fast forward 160 school days and we are writing full-blown informational reports!  WOW kinders are amazing humans!  So here is our informational report journey...enjoy!

We had to have a lot of modeling in Writer's Workshop on how to start an informational report.  #KFkinders were REALLY good at writing detail sentences (because we were so excited to learn new things about our animals), but we struggled to come up with a topic sentence that would cover the main idea of each chapter.  So we practiced while learning about sharks.  We really had to dig deep and review what it meant to find the main idea of our report, and then craft that into a topic sentence.  We would read a little bit each day about sharks, then stop and decide what the main idea was.  Once we found the main idea, we could then outline details.  After we found all our details, we went back and composed a topic sentence together and wrote it on our poster.  This helped when we would go to write our informational report for the day because we could read our topic sentence and that is how we started our report!  Then we would look at what details we learned.  Mrs. Fisher would not write the details in complete sentences because that was something we could do by ourselves.  We would use our turn and talk partners to say a complete sentence with each detail from the poster.  This is what we called our detail sentences!  When we were all done practicing that, the last hard part came.  We couldn't just end our report with a detail, so we worked together again to come up with an ending (closing) sentence.  This sentence kind of sounds like a topic sentence!  This was really hard for us, so we came up with the sentence together and Mrs. Fisher would write it on the poster.  Then after we wrote all of our detail sentences by ourselves, we could look at the poster and remember the awesome ending sentence we came up with.  Check out an example of our Writer's Workshop poster below.

After a lot of practice writing our informational reports together in Writer's Workshop, we were ready to try them in Workstations.  For our informational reports #KFkinders got to pick to be 1 of the following animal groups:

• snakes
• spiders
• penguins
• whales

Within these groups we tried to learn as much as we possibly could about our animal.  We read books, we watched YouTube videos, we asked Google for some fact checking!  It was so much fun.  Then we took time to write a chapter book about our animals.  To do this we had to do some pre-writing (what...kinders can use graphic organizers?!?! ABSOLUTELY!!).  We drew concept webs, we identified 3 topics we wanted to write about, and we outlined details for each topic with Mrs. Andresen.  Check out some examples of our pre-writing stage!

The next stage was to use our detail outlines to write a a chapter.  We split our report into 3 different chapters, so that meant we needed to write 3 different topic sentences...oh my!  The first 2 chapters were still a little hard for us to come up with the topic sentences on our own, but by the 3rd chapter it started all coming together!  We got to use our detail outlines to help us write our detail sentences, and then Mrs. Fisher helped us with the ending sentences.  When we were done, we had a chapter book of informational reports on our animal.  

The final stage was reading our informational report in front of the green screen.  We love to use the green screen and share with our families.  It is great to read through our writing and to listen to ourselves read.  Listen to see how fluent I am reading aloud, this is always something we can work on at home when I bring home a Take Home Book or a piece of writing!  Enjoy!

   Jackson-Snakes

   Roman-Snakes

   Kole-Snakes   

  Sterling-Spiders

   Tripp-Spiders 

Elizabeth-Spiders

Lauren-Penguins

Maliah-Penguins

Grayce-Penguins

Maggie-Penguins

Payten-Whales   

Payten-Whales     

Olivia-Whales   

Kaleb-Spiders                     

                                 Leah-Snakes         

            Brock-Whales