#DigiWriMo Sound Stories: What They (Students) Made

This is my wrap-up post for series I have been doing about teaching my sixth graders how to create Sound Stories — writing and recording stories in Garageband with sound effects. Today, I want to share out some of the students’ work. (Note: I wrote more about this project at Middleweb.) This is connected to […]

#DigiWriMo Sound Stories: A Garageband Tutorial

(I have been exploring sound with my students as part of Digital Writing Month. I also wrote a more expansive piece about these sound stories for my Middleweb monthly column this week.) I was asked by a few visitors to my blog this week to create a tutorial for making “sound stories” with Garageband. I […]

#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 […]

#DigiWriMo Sound Stories: The One I Made

(flickr photo by Attila Hajdu http://flickr.com/photos/attilahajdu/5321511238 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license) I’ve been moving “Sound Stories” into my writing classroom the past two weeks, teaching students how to write a story that incorporates sound effects/audio as part of storytelling, and then diving into Garageband to “compose” a piece with sounds embedded into the […]

#DigiWriMo: Sculpting Stories with Sound

My sixth graders are in the midst of creating Sound Stories — small stories that are built for audio, with sound effects being the driving force behind the writing and then learning how to use Garageband as the tool for sculpting stories. I wrote about this last year, too, for my column at Middleweb. The […]

Small Stories: Writing Microfiction on Mastodon

I am going to try do a few sequential days of writing microfiction, using daily one-word prompts by Wandering Shop Stories off Mastodon. It’s a challenge to write small but still capture the energy of a story or a character. Here are two of my stories … Word: Run The rabbit ran, in zigzag circles, […]

Progressive Poem: Lines From Stories

This is something a bit different for me. I signed up to become one of many folks passing along lines of a poem throughout April. Thanks, Margaret, for allowing me to step into this massive poetic collaboration. (Here is a full list of all blogger/poets who are contributing to the effort). I’ve been loosely keeping […]

Book Review: Campfire Stories (Tales from America’s National Parks)

We bought this book for educators who took part in a Professional Development course through a partnership between Western Massachusetts Writing Project and the Springfield Armory National Historic Site, and then the Pandemic hit, and so we only recently were able to get the book to those past participants because the Springfield Armory was closed […]