A Water Story using Waterlife and Storybird!

Recently, several classes of grade 8 students visited the library in order to research water. They were interested in topics like water pollution, water use, the water cycle and the belugas whales in the St. Lawrence River.
Mrs. G. Singh and myself first discussed the project approximately two months before students were to arrive in the library for research sessions. Last year we utilized a Web 2.0 tool called Storybird.  It's an easy and versatile site that can be used for all sorts of activities from creative writing to writing non-fiction picture books.
Mrs. Singh and I came up with a set of criteria for the kids and tried to build on the project from the previous year. This year we added some time to research water issues using the National Film Board site called "WaterLife" Students were given a graphic organizer called "A Gem of an Idea". I've Included an image of the organizer here along with the instructions for using it.

The students spent two classes searching through the website writing down interesting facts and sharing this information with their peers by creating graphic organizers about water. Here are some examples. 

Students were then instructed to come up with some ideas for writing a story that would explain what they had learned about their chosen water topic. We discussed main ideas and themes and then students wrote a short organizer and began creating their stories on Storybird. The paid version of Storybird allows you to print out the stories as PDFs. We utilized the free version of Storybird.





Here are some screen shots from their Stories. This first story is an example of some of the topics and images available on Storybird. The idea behind Storybird is to take inspiration from the pictures available. Part of our struggle is to show the kids that their story needs to evolve from the images. Some students do struggle with this. We are lenient in that in the case of the story below this is a killer whale image not a Beluga.

This story discussed Beluga whales. 

Here's a second example. Again I'm showing just the cover page and one page from inside the story. 

The students seemed to enjoy this project and gave us lots of good feedback. The advantage to this project was our ability to combine language skills with research for science. In the end it was an effective way to integrate subject matter.