The Li’l Stories Framework

Everything you need to get started, activity ideas and tips to make Li’l Stories an engaging experience.

Learning through storytelling

Li’l Stories is an educational framework for literacy. It teaches young children to express themselves through visual, spoken and written storytelling. Li’l Stories guides kids through the collaborative creation and sharing of a visual narrative. It utilizes children’s natural love for stories and storytelling to teach English Language Arts. By telling stories around subjects you are covering in class or at home — be it history, a class trip or animal studies — children are reiterating and reinforcing what they have learned. And they love it, are engaged and practice creative thinking, collaborating and communicating.

How Li’l Stories works

Li’l Stories guides students through three activities: first they create a story, and then they share it. They can also “capture” or record the story using the Li’l Stories app.

1. Creating Stories
   Using the Li’l Stories storyboards, students first define their story elements, or inputs, then they create the story individually or in groups. They do this through drawing and writing. They learn about story structure, story elements and sequencing.
2. Sharing Stories
   After creating their stories, students tell them in a classroom or informal setting at home. This shows them how to articulate and communicate their ideas. They practice public speaking, getting feedback and responding to it. You can extend the story share by uploading the stories to your class website, where they can be experienced by friends and family outside the classroom.
3. Capturing Stories
   Using the Li’l Stories app (or any other note-taking/capturing app, i.e. Adobe Voice), students capture their stories by taking a photo of their storyboard and recording each other telling the story. This helps them learn about living in a connected world and sharing their creations, work and ideas with a wider audience online.

You can combine these three activities in different ways — the exercise can be a short story creation and sharing activity, or the beginning of a longer unit in which students turn their visual stories into written narratives or develop them further into plays, puppet shows or films.

Storyboarding

Artists, designers and filmmakers often use storyboarding as a framework that provides structure for linear storytelling. Similarly, the act of storyboarding helps students structure their narratives and organize their thinking. The Li’l Stories storyboard consists of three elements:

• 3 input boxes
  Content covered in your class or at home can be used to inspire characters, settings and plots of stories created by the kids. You can define these elements or let the students come up with their own.
• 9 story boxes
  Students can retell stories they’ve read or heard in class, or create new stories around specific topics or story structures like historical narratives, pourquoi tales or fairy tales.
• 2 disruption boxes
  As an option, you can use the “disruption” fields to have students add characters or change the settings of their stories. These can be defined by you or chosen by the kids. It’s a great way for them to learn about story elements.

If you’d like your students to be able to easily edit their stories, have them draw and write on Post-its, so they can move the individual story boxes. Use two different colored Post-its — one color for inputs and disruptions and the other for the story itself.

You can also create your own storyboard using Post-its (in 2” by 2” or 3” by 3” sizes) and large sheets of construction paper. Have students arrange the Post-its in one of the storyboard configurations shown earlier. Use different colored Post-its to differentiate between inputs and the story itself.

Activity Ideas

Li’l Stories was developed and tested in collaboration with several elementary school teachers. Here are a few activity ideas that proved especially successful — and popular — in the classroom:

Story Creation
• Introduction to storytelling, story elements and story structure
• Retell and adapt stories (books, movies, fairy tales, historical stories)
• Create new stories with a specific story structure (pourquoi tales, fairy tales, etc.)
• Create stories around social study curriculum
• Introduce new vocabulary
• Brainstorm and plan stories and develop them further into written narratives, plays or films

Story Share
• Share stories in the classroom or at home
• Communicate ideas with a group
• Share stories online for storytelling activities at home
• Have a storytelling party at the end of the unit for students to share their stories with friends and family

Tips

Here are a few tips to make it a fun and easy process for everyone:

• Flexibility
  The framework is flexible and you can change the story structure based on your learning goals. Children love stories and learn when using them. By telling a story about something covered in class — like a book you have read together, or the way Native Americans used to live — they can integrate their new knowledge into their stories and reinforce the learning.
  The story element inputs let you frame the stories the students are creating, providing them with context and helping them figure out the themes of their narratives before they tell them.
• Modeling
  We recommend creating the first story together with your kids. Determine the inputs, and then either retell a story you have read together or create a new one. We have found this to be the most effective way for children to understand the storytelling framework. You can project the Li’l Stories storyboard on a smart board for easy modeling.
  When it’s time for the oral storytelling portion of the exercise, explain transition words and have them visible in the classroom. You can model it for the children by telling the story you created at the beginning of class.
• Collaboration
  Structuring the collaboration is important, because small things can derail a group. Assigning each child a number that corresponds to specific boxes helps the exercise run smoothly. Each child receives a number at the beginning of the activity when they write their name on the storyboard. Number the story boxes accordingly in the top left corner (so if there are three children in a group: 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, etc.) This gives each child the responsibility for a specific story box. Everyone can discuss the story, but only one child will draw what’s happening.
• Visual Notetaking
  Kids like to draw and to color. For this not to turn into a drawing or coloring activity, it’s important to use markers and smaller Post-its. This way children won’t get stuck on the details. The goal of the activity is to take visual and written notes for a story that is being told orally, and possibly develop it further into a more fleshed-out narrative, play or storytelling event.