Cooperative Storytelling (LS-ES-229)

‘Cooperative tales’ is an activity aimed at 4-year-old children that we created at the school Divino Maestro in Las Torres de Cotillas, Murcia, Spain. With this activity, we want to develop our pupils’ teamwork and digital competence, among other skills.

Inspired by the cinema of attraction

On this occasion, students engaged in a cooperative storytelling activity, creating 4 digital stories inspired by some shorts movies from Segundo de Chomón. We selected frames from the short films to elaborate our digital stories. In addition, students recorded their voices so each story was told by its protagonists and, additionally, it made it more accessible. That way we also developed oral expression, so important at this stage of children’s education.

The basics of storytelling

Before making the design and production of the stories, we studied the basic elements of a story and reviewed some classic stories. Once this was done, we went on to visualize the short films that were later to be reinterpreted and used to create the students’ own stories. Through this activity, they also learnt about the origins of the cinema and discovered a new way of telling stories only with images, without words, voice, or music.

We organized ourselves in cooperative teams of 5 or 6 members to design the story, with its characters, its location, its action … Once the main elements of our story had been decided and agreed upon, each team member developed a digital story scene and then gave voice to it. At this point, the students wrote the text in the scenes using the voice dictation offered by Google Slides and inserted the text as a narrator or as a dialogue as appropriate. The teacher only guided the process and moderated this activity.

Enhancing creativity

It was a task that greatly enhanced respect for the work of the teammates, the creativity of the students in terms of dialogues and the development of events. It was evaluated after each session to verify the degree of satisfaction of the students with the work done and the contributions and attitudes of all the members of the group.

‘Cooperative stories’ is a highly recommended activity to be carried out with students of any age because of the number of skills that are enhanced through it, both at a personal and group level.

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The featured image used to illustrate this article has been taken by and belongs to the author of the learning scenario.