Students in Wendy Buchanan’s fourth-grade class at the Park Avenue Elementary School, Freehold Borough, work on their video autobiographies. Buchanan received a $1,500 grant from the Freehold Borough Educational Foundation, which allowed her to purchase equipment for a digital mastery program. FREEHOLD – Storytelling has always played a vital role in a student’s learning process.
With today’s technology the art of storytelling has become high-tech and includes audio and visual stimulation. Such is the case in Wendy Buchanan’s fourthgrade class at the Park Avenue Elementary School in Freehold Borough.
By using a $1,500 grant provided by the Freehold Borough Educational Foundation, the pupils in Buchanan’s class are not only learning how to tell stories, but also how to show them on a large screen.
Paper binders and illustrations are not necessary for these student storytellers because all of the factual information, along with photos, have been saved onto a DVD, making the storytelling digital.
The Freehold Borough Educational Foundation has provided $64,000 since 2001 to projects in the borough’s school district, according to foundation member Jean Holtz. The foundation assists students and teachers create new opportunities for learning that are not funded in the regular school district budget.
Six pupils in Buchanan’s class came to a recent Board of Education meeting, equipment in hand, to demonstrate to the board members how they wrote their stories and to show them the final digital story product.
Buchanan’s foundation grant allowed her to purchase a digital camera, a digital camcorder, a Canon scanner and a microphone. Also on the shopping list were DVDs and a portable DVD burner, Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Elements software, as well as the license for the use of the software on 11 computers in her classroom.
The children were asked to write about places where they feel comfortable, safe and happy.
According to Buchanan, the pupils scanned photographs and hand-drawn images into the computer, imported music, recorded voices and composed and edited their stories to develop and share clear, structured, effective stories.
“The story is the start and the heart of the process,” Buchanan said.
Once the students had a clear vision of their stories they moved to visually representing their chosen location by drawing, painting, creating a collage, collecting images and selecting music to match the feeling of their places. The final phase of the process was sharing their stories with others.
And sharing is what the pupils did with board members and the audience at the meeting. Each child created a profile of himself or herself and titled it “All About Me.”
The children provided their own physical description. With a touch of humor, some youngsters even included little telltale characteristics, such as Melissa Cecchini, 9, who said she has “lop-sided pierced ears with gems of aqua.”
The youngsters were asked to be visually descriptive. Kayla Ciok, 9, described her hair as “dark blonde, the color of damp sand,” and her eyes as being “bluish green like the color of the ocean.”
The video presentations were brief, a few minutes each, but in that time a viewer was able to glean a great deal about the author, not just from the words he or she said and the photos they displayed, but from the tone of their voice – a trait that might have been lost if the story had been written on paper.
The authors shared personal stories about people they feel safe and comfortable with and places where they feel safe.
A photo of a vacation to Florida by Hannah Grisinger, 9, or photos of Kayla Ciok’s family vacation home in North Carolina both depicted images where the girls felt like they were “home” because of the people they were with, even though they were hundreds of miles away from Freehold Borough.
Dawson De Vito showed photos of his family’s winery in New York. Caroline Adams’ story evoked an emotional response when she showed photos of her late father. Although it is difficult to have only one parent now, Caroline said still she still has “tons of fun” with her mom.
Nicholas Belka, 10, who is now in the fifth grade, was the first student to work on the digital mastery program in his classroom last year, and Buchanan entered his DVD in a Coldwell Banker contest titled “An American Dream, My Home.” Nicholas won $100 in the contest for the story of his home that he told in the form of a poem. Board members were treated to his story at the meeting as well.
The children’s recorded voices were accompanied by music they chose themselves – music that means something to them and helped to show those who viewed the video who they were.
Buchanan has previously been awarded grants from the foundation, one for “All in the Game,” which helped her students learn about the stock market. She also received a grant for “AFamilyAffair,” which helped students create their own families. The youngsters were taught how to learn to live in the “real world” and learned skills such as managing a checkbook.
“The kids thrive on these projects,” Buchanan said, adding that without the foundation she would never be able to do these out-of-the-ordinary projects.
And, according to Buchanan, one of the best things about these projects is that the equipment remains in the classroom so that hundreds of children in the future will also be able to thrive on the projects as well.