Traditional Tales with a Twist: Rashomon through Tweets!


Today Year 4 were given a mammoth challenge in English. We introduced the idea of a Rashomon story: a story told from different perspectives. They had to choose a familiar story and retell it from two different character's perspective. That sounds a challenge in itself but I decided to take it a step further by explaining that the character's version of the story had to be told through 5 tweets, each of 140 characters EXACTLY!

The children relished the challenge and had my new app. 1-4-0 to help. The app allows children to write a story or text within a grid of 140 boxes. The app has a word counter and a character counter to make sure children keep to the constraint. This is an idea I have previously blogged about and share on my training to actively encourage pupils to play and experiment with words and language. What I love about the idea of using twitter as a constraint is that a character can be a letter, a space or a punctuation mark. So children will actively muck about with the use of different punctuation marks to help reach the 140 goal. The idea was inspired by all the constrained writing challenges featured in Alan Peat's books. 

To make sure the app enhance what can be done on paper, alongside the character and word counter, there is the option to turn the message into a fake tweet. This is a great teaching tool, as teachers can use this to create fake tweets from celebrities with deliberate mistakes for the children to spot and correct.

The children had to tell the story as a character through 5 tweets of 140 characters exactly. It was a tough task but one the children enjoyed. They worked brilliantly, trying ideas, changing words and phrases to make their story fit.


For most of the children, there wasn't enough time in the session to complete the whole task but all of them managed to get a few tweets done. Here are a couple of examples from stories such as: Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Little Pigs, Jack and the Beanstalk and Hansel and Gretal. 











For those children who did finish, they could put all their tweets together using the app Adobe Spark Page. I have previously blogged about this cracking app, where children can create stunning web pages for a variety of tasks. Here is one of the finished efforts from the class:

undefined

Comments

  1. Madison14 July 2016 at 12:50

    Wow, this sounds like a really fun, intelligent, and easy way to use tech in the classroom! It seems like you've really made the most of the 1-4-0 app, and it looks like a fantastic way to teach students about word length, editing, story telling, you accomplish so much with such a simple app, it is very impressive. It is nice that you keep it very simple as well, there are not a lot of elements involved so it is easy to get the students up to speed and involved.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Luke16 July 2016 at 04:37

    Great idea mate, love the thinking, as well as the tool!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Lovely Poem for Your Leavers Assembly

Image
I am always asked to put a little video together for our Year 6 show and end of year assembly. Each year, I always include a special poem that I finish the end of year video with. It is called Leaving School by Jade Hughes and it is beautiful: We've now left school, It's how the story ends, Tears of happiness is what we recommend,   It's what we say, But there's always a little pain, Because once you've left, It's not the same,   You could walk through school and you would see, Your friends who have grown up incredibly, But now you've gone, It's not the same, As you may never see them again,   Your friends who have grown up right beside you, Who have helped you through your daily strife, Will go ahead and leave behind them, You who wants the same old life,   But you can not live your life in the past, Hoping that the same memories will last, You have to move on and just be glad, That leaving has made you so sad, As this just shows that...
Keep reading

Using Disney Films for Geography!

Image
Last week I came across a tweet sharing this picture: I thought it would be a brilliant way for children to learn about the location of different countries around the world.  Before we looked at the map, I asked the class to list as many animated Disney films (excluding Pixar) as they could think of. We shared some of our ideas and discussed the origins of some of these stories. Some were books, others fairy tales, legends or folk tales.  This gave us a link with Literacy to discuss different types of stories, how most films are derived from written texts and also looking at some famous authors. We also talked about whether they could remember where in the world the film was set.  I then shared the map with the children and gave them time to look and see whether they knew any of the countries themselves. They had to make estimated guesses as to where they thought each film was set. After they had had a go at trying the name all the countries, they t...
Keep reading

Teaching Direct Speech Punctuation using the iPhone text messaging!

Image
Teaching direct speech is always a tricky aspect, there is so much to remember and very few useful visual pictures that clearly help children know what and how to use speech punctuation properly. Lets look at some of the tips to remember: The words that are spoken have to go within the speech marks. Any punctuation needs to also go inside the speech marks. A reporting clause, who and how they said it can go before, middle or end. A comma follows the reporting clause at the beginning. You need to start a new line when a new character speaks.  I think that is most of them?? I have heard of endless different ways to try and get children to remember these tips - keeping the sheeps in the pen  or speech mark sandwich  which are a couple of examples however they do not have any visual help for tips such as starting on a new line, which is something some of my children find hardest to remember.  I decided to use a different approach, to help cover the...
Keep reading