Thursday, February 1, 2007 Older Editions

Creating support for young learners

By Michelle Wiener
What's Up contributor

Pre-kindergarten students at Shawsheen School are learning about storytelling in a whole new way, with a little help from some creative teachers and a grant from the Andover Fund for Education.

Pre-K teacher Gretchen Curtis created Storytelling, a program that focuses on building children's "interest in literature and familiarity with classic literature and improving their overall storytelling skills," says Curtis.

Since most kids at the pre-K level are not reading yet, Curtis and the other teachers want to focus on the precursor skills to reading. They want the students to enter elementary school enjoying literature and being interested in it, she says.

The students are learning to remember events of a story, put them in sequence, and then retell them. They are also using their imaginations to develop their own stories that incorporate skills like rhyming and phonemic grammar.

Curtis' afternoon class recently read The Mitten by Jan Brett. In the story, animals find a lost mitten that they crawl inside of. Now, her class is creating its own version of the story called "The Pants."

"They have to use their imagination to come up with where the pants came from, who they belong to, how the animals got in, and how they fall out," explains Curtis.

The work also employs all of the students' different senses and "incorporates all different learning styles" based on the Massachusetts learning standards, says Curtis. Students have created masks of the animals in The Mitten and they are working on illustrating and acting out stories as well as reading them.

Curtis developed the idea for the program and submitted the grant to the AFE. AFE has lent its support, providing money for the pre-made materials. Teachers have purchased a resource book and materials like puppets, a puppet theater and felt boards, which the students use to act out events in the stories. As a result, they have been able to approach reading from a "different angle," focusing on learning about classic books, fairytales and nursery rhymes.

"I just thought it would be a good way to focus on literacy at the pre-K age," Curtis says of the program.