Li’l Stories Labs for elementary schools are 1 week long storytelling programs with one 45-60 minute session a day. We customize our labs to suit your curriculum and classroom needs. Contact us to learn about our pricing or to schedule a lab at your school or organization.
GRADES K TO 2, 5 class storytelling unit, conducted over the course of 1 week
The Lab introduces students to how a plant grows through the lens of Eric Carle’s The Tiny Seed. Students will sequence a retell of the story highlighting the major stages of plant growth and create original stories based on one of the characters or settings in the story.
GRADES K TO 2, 5 class storytelling unit, conducted over the course of 1 week
The Lab gives students an opportunity to create fictional animal stories while integrating real facts they have gathered from research. Students will structure a visual story and engage in the collaborative process of researching a topic, and creating and sharing a narrative.
GRADES K TO 3, 5 class storytelling unit, conducted over the course of 1 week
The Lab gives students the opportunity to acquire and practice sight words or high frequency words in the context of story creation. Students will collaboratively structure a visual story utilizing different words from the word bank given and share their stories.
GRADES 2 to 4, 5 class storytelling unit, conducted over the course of 1 week
The Lab introduces students to a specific story structure, pourquoi tales. Within the context of a Native American study, students will sequence a retell
of a pourquoi tale, collaboratively construct their own pourquoi tales and share them with the class.
2nd and 3rd grade class, school year 2016-2017
Team 303 participated in a 1 week long Li’l Stories Lab, where they collaborated, created, captured, and shared stories. They retold the Ojibwa Legend “How the Beaver got his tale” and had a lot of fun creating their own pourquoi tales. Students practiced critical thinking, communication and collaborating.
1st grade class, school year 2016-2017
Team 306 participated in a 1 week long Li’l Stories Lab, where they collaborated, created, captured, and shared stories. They had a lot of fun researching an animal and creating animal stories incorporating the facts they had gathered from their research. Students studied elephants, lions, meerkats, or monkeys
K class, school year 2016-2017
Team 211 participated in a 3 day long Li’l Stories Lab, where they collaborated, created, captured, and shared stories. They had a lot of fun practicing sight words or high frequency words in the context of story creation. Students captured their stories and shared their stories with their friends.
K class, school year 2016-2017
Team 211 participated in a 1 week long Li’l Stories Lab, where they collaborated, created, captured, and shared stories. Students researched an animal (Elephant, Lion, and Monkey) and created animal stories incorporating the facts they had gathered from their research. Students captured their stories through image and audio and shared their stories with their friends in class.
K class, school year 2016-2017
Team 211 participated in a 6 week long Li’l Stories Lab, where they collaborated, created, captured, and shared stories. Students retold a story by Eric Carle (The Tiny Seed, The Hungry Caterpillar, and The Greedy Python) and created original stories inspired by the book’s characters or events. They captured their stories using our Li’l Stories app and presented their stories to the class.
K class, school year 2015-2016
Team 211 tested our Li’l Stories app. Students learned that if they wanted to share their drawings and other artifacts with friends online, they had to turn them into digital artifacts first. They used the Li’l Stories app to capture the weekend news stories they “wrote” earlier in the week: they took a photo of their drawing and then recorded their story. They were very excited to share their weekend news stories with their parents.
2/3 grade class, school year 2014-2015
Magnus Sweger used the Li’l Stories framework for the Native American/pourquoi tale unit: Students either created their own pourquoi tales or retold pourquoi stories they had heard in class. Students learned how to storyboard, edit, tell stories to friends or in front of the class and turn their visual and oral stories into readers theater dialogues. Magnus wrapped up the unit with a publishing party, where students shared their stories with parents and friends. Magnus’ feedback on Li’l Stories: “It helps students find their voice. They are working on how stories are put together. It helps them organize their thinking.”
1st grade class, school year 2014-2015
Kelly Rosenblum has been a huge supporter of Li’l Stories. When we just started out in late 2014, she was open to “prototyping” Li’l Stories with her kids. We lead a series of storytelling workshops from November to January that taught students about collaboration, story elements like character and setting as well as visual and oral storytelling. Kelly’s feedback on Li’l Stories: “My students loved creating stories, drawing and telling them. They were engaged and didn’t even realize they are learning.”
Self-guided activity, since March 2016
“Art Stories” is a visual storytelling project that allows children to create their own stories inspired by artworks on view at CMA, and share them with friends, family, and the public. Children will look at artwork on view at the museum; make their own visual storyboards to tell a tale inspired by what they see; capture their stories through image and audio in the Media Lab and share their creations through presentations of selected stories on social media and documentation online.
March 2015
Emily Collins, the teacher of Girl Stories—a free program for girls ages 12-15, who are interested in telling their stories through filmmaking, animation, and comics—used a custom version of the Li’l Stories storyboard for the brainstorming and planning phase of a collaborative animation project. The girls created an “I remember …” poem, consisting of 12 sentences with each girl contributing one “I remember …” line. They used the boards to plan their scenes and materials. Then they created animations of their poems based on their storyboards.
February 2015
In the art colony Puppets on Film, Katya Buslo used the Li’l Stories framework to introduce her students to collaborative storytelling. Students brainstormed and planned in groups of 3-4 kids the story of their puppet films.
More about the Puppets on Film art colony on CMA’s blog.
1st grade class, school year 2016-2017
On March 10th, 2017, Li’l Stories participated in P.S. 261’s Arts Day, a day-long, school-wide celebration of the arts with hands-on workshops presented by a working artist, arts assemblies and a school-wide arts project. We worked with 1st grade class 210: in groups of two, students created original stories inspired by the characters of the book Lulu and the Brontosaurus by Judith Viorst and shared their stories with the class.
2nd grade classes, school year 2015-2016
Li’l Stories collaborated with teaching artist Rima Fand, who is using a custom version of the Li’l Stories storyboards as part of BRIDGES, an ArtsConnection residency exploring literacy through puppetry with early childhood in 2nd grade classes at PS 153Q.
In BRIDGES, students created adaptations of the Chinese folktale “The Fourth Question” to be performed as shadow puppet plays. Each small group of students created an original scene in the story, for which they created puppet characters, props, and scenery, and which they eventually performed before an audience of students and parents. Rima said: ” The storyboards were a wonderful tool for the students, in particular the English language learners, to be able to map out their story ideas in sequence, and to be able to visualize the characters and settings.” Teachers later went on to use the storyboards in their literacy unit on “Charlotte’s Web.”
Brooklyn School Alternatives Conference 2016
On June 5th, 2016, Li’l Stories facilitated one of the activity tables at the Play and Learn Children’s Festival—an interactive event with a wide range of engaging learning experiences and playful activities for kids attending the Brooklyn School Alternatives Conference. Children had lots of fun creating and sharing stories inspired by their favorite characters.
