Moviemaking in First Grade

As part of my pre-service field experience, I've been working with a 1st grader in the area of literacy. In my class concerning literacy in the primary grades, we've recently discussed the taking advantage of the literacies children bring into the classroom - which are often not taken advantage of. Specifically, we have looked at play and storying using the interests and knowledge our students have.

The student I've been working with, a 1st grade boy who I'll refer to by the pseudonym Frank, told me he enjoyed watching Spongebob Squarepants. As I only have a passing familiarity with the program, Frank was my expert on the show. I explained to him that we were going to make drawings of the characters and background and make our own movie with those characters. Together we drew pictures of some of the characters from the show, and I had to look at pictures of the characters online in order to help. We discussed what the characters could do, and Frank suggested the characters could be outside Squidward's house. Since we ran out of time, I then created the backgrounds myself, and brought them to our next meeting for our filming.

I asked Frank what story we could make up with our characters and he immediately started to act it out, rather than really plan it. Attempting to catch up, I started filming his play. In this first story, Frank captured the antagonist relationship that I understand to really exist between Squidward and Spongebob. He also had Spongebob and Patrick go "jellyfishing", another activity from the show.

In his second story, I was able to prompt Frank to do a little more planning of what our story would be about, prior to playing it out. Here, there is "jellyfishing", but also quite a lot of karate chopping and fighting. Robotic, or bionic, arms also made an appearance. I asked Frank if this is the sort of thing that happens in the show and he claimed that it is, though I am skeptical - though, I am not the expert. My guess is that Frank used these characters in ways influenced from other media and stories he's experienced, rather than in strict accordance to the show's structure.

Finally, in the third story, Frank wanted to have jellyfish, so he quickly drew some to incorporate them into the play. Here, the jellyfish queen shocked Patrick, so that Spongebob then attempted and caught a smaller jellyfish instead. After storing it at Spongebob's house, Patrick went to Squidward's to harass him again. They knocked on his door and told him that they'd left him a present. Then the jellyfish queen was left outside Squidward's house, shocking him when he came outside. Finally, Spongebob reunited the jellyfish queen with her previously captured family member.

In the course of less than a half hour, Frank created three stories that included a variety of plot elements that took advantage of traditional and non-traditional story elements from the show. Additionally, characters were developed via they're interactions with each other. Comparing this to a writing sample this student provided my several weeks ago, he included far more detail and creativity in his spontaneous (and slightly planned) storying. I would be interested to have more experiences in this situation and see how an activity like this could affect Frank with a subsequent writing opportunity. As it is, with written language serving as the bottleneck for effective storymaking, using props and oral storytelling frees a young child like Frank to be much more creative.