This was not my first storytelling experience but I will say it was one of my most stressful! Currently, I've been traveling every single week which is made finding books and time to record very stressfully. working out at this choice I figured that doing a series of poems would be for the best. So after my flight coming from the American Library Association conference and arriving in Dallas for some EDI work, I was able to find time at my grandmother's house to read a book. The only issue being my grandmother had gotten rid of all the children's books that I had at the house!
So I improvised and went to the Poetry Foundation website and searched for a children's poem. Now as a mid-level ELA teacher mind immediately went to some of the poems that I've had my students analyze this past year. Leading to me choosing the Land of Nod, you see it is not only a personal favorite of mine but also something that my students truly enjoyed so I figured what makes for a better story time than something I know to catch interest.
When it came to recording the actual video it took three takes. originally I was going to attempt to print out the poem and read it that way but the family printer is broken and I was a little worried about going to the library when I didn't have a car to get back and forth. So then my first video I decided that I can just read the poem off of a tablet! but it didn't work out as the glare from the tablet made it so that you could not even see the poem. So I had to Monitor and adjust and my mind immediately went back to when I was teaching online and had to do readings with my students so I pulled up Zoom to record!
Only to find out that for some reason the camera wasn't working in Zoom. I found that if I split-screen and put the camera app of the computer on one side with the story on the other I was still able to get that full look of showing both the poem as well as myself while I was reading, which came in handy. I was a little worried about how I would look on screen recording doing it this way but it turned out fairly well with me being able to show a lot of emotions and body language.
Going forward in this class I am going to be so happy when I am back in my own home because there I have children's books. but I'm actually really liking the idea of doing a children's poetry series. Maybe even set up a compare and contrast poetry section where I read maybe two or three poems based upon a specific theme as well as in a specific genre. So reading folktale poems all centered on nature would probably be something big that I decide to do and making sure that I'm not traveling while having to record is going to be a big thing for me!
Weekly Reading List:
While getting the weekly reading done, I've actually been accessing sites like commonlit, ReadWorks, and Newsela that I typically use while I'm teaching a class and finding poems and short stories that I haven't read that fit the different genre requirements that I could have been used within the next year when I'm assigning work to my students.
Fable
1. THE FOX AND THE HORSE
2. THE BOY WHO CRIED WOLF
3. THE FARMER AND THE VIPER
Folktale
1. THE CLEVER RABBIT
2. THE FISHERMAN AND HIS WIFE
3. THE FOUR DRAGONS
Parable
1. THE SELFISH GIANT
2. THE THREE QUESTIONS
3. THE STORY OF THE BAD LITTLE BOY
Myth
1. THE STORY OF PROMETHEUS AND PANDORA'S BOX
2. THE GOLDEN TOUCH
3. ECHO AND NARCISSUS
Hi Michael,
ReplyDeleteI am sorry to hear about all of the problems you had this week when it came to recording your reading video. I did multiple takes myself and think I still could have done better. You brought up a lot of good points when you described some of the problems you faced when recording. The setup before recording is very important and choosing where to record has a huge effect on the final product. I think I will end up changing where I record next time because I also had some visibility issues. I think you hit all of the main sections when it comes to your storytelling process and experience. You were very descriptive and made me feel like I was there suffering alongside you. The only negative I would note is that you had some grammar issues in your blog post, especially when it came to sentence capitalization. Great job otherwise though.