I truly believe that story telling is such an important part of a young child’s life and it is so essential for adults to share and provide stories for children. Storytelling opens so many doors for children in learning as well as with their skills such as observing, listening, being patient, waiting their turn and most importantly fuel for their imaginations. In my PDS I have been with a first grade class and now I am with a kindergarten class and I love reading stories to the children because of the excitement they feel when they use their imaginations and create things in their minds that allow them to fall in love with storytelling. I think that digital storytelling is a good thing because digital media such as videos and pictures can help expand children's imaginations. Also it can give children some information to help them better understand the story and be able to create a picture in their minds, for an example my first grade teacher was reading a book with little pictures and the animal platypus was in the context but some of the children interrupted her and were confused about what a platypus was, so the teacher had to pull up a picture on her computer for the students to understand. I think that digital story telling can help with problems like that so the children can bring characters to life and better comprehend.
I think that digital story telling has many benefits and that using pictures or videos can be more attention grabbing for children. Also recorded audio of silly animal noises or voices will allow the children to interact more because they will be very interested. I believe that what makes a story a good story is the moral learned in the end. Good morals of life lessons are important in stories to help teach children what is right and wrong, good or bad, or simply morals or endings that make you smile and laugh.
Some ideas from my PDS experiences that I would consider to include in my digital story could be the importance of reading books to children, importance of being fair to them, the importance of classroom management, the importance of the teacher student relationships, and
the importance of the “tutor” student relationships for children to be able to make a connection with you and put their trust in me. But the topic that I would go with right now would be the importance of exciting activities and lessons in classrooms. I would have to go with this one because when I would teach my short lessons in my first grade classrooms I would try and make the activities very exciting for the children so they would be better engaged, which they were, and there would be an overall better more positive outcome with the progress. An interesting story could be about how I taught a lesson about corn stalks and I started out reading a story to them, then I drew on the whiteboard and has them copy, draw and label the cornstalk, and lastly had them fill out a worksheet on corn and popcorn. So of course to make it more interesting I brought went in the back and popped bags full of popcorn so it would make the worksheet easier to fill out how the popcorn smelled, felt and tasted like. During the lesson I kept the energy level high and everyone was motivated and when I brought in the popcorn it was nice to see them having so much fun. The one boy even ran up to me gave me a hug and said “this is the best day ever!” I feel that lessons and activities that are engaging and fun for students, would be the ones that they will always remember what they learned that day. Another activity I did was have them get up and jump around while we practiced spelling words, there was a ton of engagement with that also. These lessons are important for children to take interest in what they are learning and keep it in their minds and with them forever!
