#DigiWriMo Sound Stories: The Ones We Made (Together)

Yesterday, I shared out a “mentor text” of a sound story that I created as I was introducing my sixth graders into the idea of composing and recording a story constructed with voice and sound effects. Today, I want to share the next step in the lesson plan: short class collaborative stories.

Here, I asked each of my sixth grade classes to work as a whole to help me write a short story that used a few animal sound effects. We used Voice Typing in Google Docs to build the story together, sentence by sentence, and then we recorded in Garageband, with students helping by using the Interactive Board to build out the sound file as I narrated it. (Ideally, I should have asked a student to come up and narrate, instead of me, but I was trying to keep the lesson moving along.)

The intent was to make visible the construction of a sound story, by doing it together. I was reminded of work done by a NWP friend, Glen Briere, who constructed entire radio programs with his class as collaborative writing experiences. I’m filing this smaller sound story project away in my mind for later consideration of how to use Glen’s idea for whole class writing experiences.

Each “story” is only a few sentences long, and the shared sound effects means there is a common thread. Notice how the stories all came to a point where all the animal sounds play together. My students enjoy cacophony. (And for me, it allowed me to show them how to layer multiple sound tracks to play at once.)

Most of my students are nearing up completion with their projects, and I will be sharing out their voices later this week.

Peace (in the sounds),
Kevin

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