Last week we rolled out our new curriculum for the spring semester, ‘Story Telling’. During the course of the next twenty weeks, our students will be learning about narratives: how and why people tell stories, why our personal stories are all important, and how stories can be a vehicle for social change. They’ll be looking at ancient forms of story telling, and means by which various cultures have recorded their own and their collaborative stories over time, etc. Then, towards the second half of the semester, they will be using photography, writing, and hopefully even video to record their own stories, and stories throughout their community, with the goal of producing a piece (a book, perhaps, or photo essays – we haven’t decided just yet!) that they can share with students around the world doing similar projects. We are very excited to get this going!
To get rolling, we spend this week talking about stories themselves, the how and why, and also looked at hieroglyphs and how symbols are used in storytelling. This is always a popular lesson – explaining how a flag is symbol, and how the ‘golden arch’ is a symbol of McDonalds always seems to do the trick. From there, students create their own symbols, and then as a group create a piece that describes either their day, or a made up story, using symbols – in particular this project is great for fostering group efforts and a sense of community amongst the students.
Next we’ll be looking at Aboriginal art, something we touched on last year that the kids really enjoyed.
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