From Fact to Fiction: Drawing and Writing Stories

After exploring the website http://www.teach-nology.com, I came across a Webquest that I think would be perfect to use as a collaborative project between a teacher and a librarian. Since I am studying to be a school librarian, I think I would like to try this project because it is a great mix of literature, getting students to appreciate reading, and reading and writing instruction. This particular project is called From Fact to Fiction: Drawing and Writing Stories and the basic gist of the project is that students will learn the differences between fiction and non-fiction and will use their new found skills to create a non-fiction story, which they will then transform into a fiction story. The link to this particular project is http://www.readwritethink.org/lessons/lesson_view.asp?id=111.

In more detail, the goals of the project, according to the overview are:

- Students will learn about story elements, including setting, characters, problem, solution, and ending
-Students will use a K-W-L chart to activate prior knowledge
-Students will use the Internet to gather information about a specific topic
-Students will express their stories orally
-Students will apply their knowledge of story elements through drawing
-Students will apply strategies learned in oral expression to reading and writing
-And students will record their stories in Powerpoint

The website uses a specific instructional plan with frogs and toads as the theme, but I believe this could be adapted to any element of the curriculum for 2nd or 3rd graders.

Since I will be in a library, I think this would be a fabulous opportunity to collaborate with teachers. The core teacher could do some of the reading and writing instruction, while, I, as the librarian, could introduce the students to accessing information on the web, reading the stories, and introducing them to the Powerpoint technology to record their stories. This would be a tremendous opportunity to illustrate the need for librarians in elementary schools (they are not state-mandated in Pennsylvania) and also an opportunity to illustrate that collaboration between teachers and librarians can work!

The biggest challenge I would have is probably also the biggest opportunity: collaboration. Teachers are often not keen to collaborate with the school librarian. For many schools library time is prep time for teachers; most of them are not willing to give up their prep time to work with the librarian. There are some teachers who just don't see the worth in collaboration, although that is steadily changing. Lastly, one more challenge in completing this particular project would be time constraints. This unit takes two to three weeks and time is precious for both librarians and teachers. Perhaps this project hits many standards in the curriculum, which would make it easier to justify using in my teaching.