What it is: My Story Maker is an amazing interactive website created for the Carnegie Libraries of Pittsburgh. My Story Maker is an interactive story book where students are in charge of creating a story. Students choose characters, and a genre and then begin telling a story. The students create the story by dragging and dropping characters, objects, and backgrounds into their story. The characters can have emotions and perform actions with the different objects and interact with each other. As students drag different elements to the story book, a story is written for them based on what is happening in the pictures. When they are finished, they have created an interactive book that they can read and share with friends.
How to integrate My Story Maker into the classroom: My Story Maker is a fantastic interactive tool to get students creating a story. What I love about this website is the way that it encourages students to create by first thinking about the elements of a story (who will it be about?, what kind of story will it be?, what happens first?, what happens next?). This is a great tool to use to help students understand the importance of beginning, middle, and end, setting, supporting details, and dialogue. My Story Maker would be fun to use to create a whole class story using an interactive whiteboard. Students could take turns adding elements to the story and reading the story aloud. As students create the class story, be sure to keep them thinking about the setting, plot, and characters. My Story Maker can also be used individually on classroom computers or in a computer lab setting. The written story will be very basic “Fox threw a ball to lion.” Encourage students to embellish their stories with vivid verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. When students are finished with their story they can download it, share it with others, preview it, or print it.
Tips: I learned about this site from Kevin Jarrett‘s excellent blog. Check it out for great tips and inspiration for your classroom!
Leave a comment and tell us how you are using My Story Maker in your classroom.
