Wonder Stories (companion books to Wonder)

I have chosen this video because it shows real individuals with craniofacial conditions like the main character of Auggie Pullman in Wonder. I feel that it would be beneficial for students to know that it is a real condition and real people are affected by it.

This video is great because the story is represented visually with music to set the tone. It would be a good example for students to follow for digital storytelling and to discuss the kind of music one could add to portray mood in storytelling.

This would be another good example of a product that students may want to create after reading the stories.

The culminating projects to be shared after reading will be determined by the classroom teacher’s interest and the grade level. For a couple of years now I have wanted to have students create book trailers but I also like the idea of digital storytelling presented in the article “Supporting middle years students in creating multimodal texts with iPad apps”(Barton & Trimble-Roles 2016). I agree with the sentiment “the range of modes and combinations of these that middle years students engage with may not equate with those provided or expected at school. Equally so, students may not be as adept at using technology as we think”(i) and believe it is the job of the Teacher Librarian to give technology tools and instruction for responsible and productive use. Also, I really like the Seven Elements of Digital stories (iii) guidelines  given in the article; I feel like they will be useful in creating engaging final products. The students will enjoy creating and sharing these digital stories and younger students will enjoy seeing them as well. 

Another option could be to create a product inspired by the style of students’ favourite books to make their own Wonder or kindness story as per the case in the article “Becoming Multimodal: Literacy In and Beyond the Classroom” (Lenters 2018).  I really connected to this article as my daughter began making a creating that connected to a series of books that she enjoys after I read the article. After posting to our class discussion, from the responses, I reflected that this kind of product could be a suggestion to students if they come up with an idea of different ways to express their representations of the readings. I feel like this would be an effective project because “…uses of multimodality in the classroom allow educators to provide students with a rich communicative repertoire for working with story and information”. This would allow students that may not want to create a digital artifact the opportunity to create in a way they want to express themselves.