Lessons from a Storyline School - Slovenia 2018

Below is the slide show presented at the 2018 International Storyline Conference by Mr. JJ Howard, a teacher at Highland Elementary School in Bend, USA. In it he shares the way he serves the Highland community as a storyline leader and facilitator of whole-school planning and teacher development.

Book-Based Presentation - Slovenia 2018

I am headed to Slovenia in a few short days to present at the 2018 International Storyline Conference. I will be presenting on book-based topics, highlighting some differences and sharing one particular storyline I recently carried out in my 2nd and 3rd grade classroom. I am posting my presentation and handouts on this blog, so that others might reference it later.

All School Storyline: Mission to Mars!

This winter our entire school decided to leave Earth and colonize Mars! This science-fiction topic was extremely high-interest, as I'm sure you can imagine, and brought our whole school community (including parents) together around this incredible way of learning. All 15 classrooms, Kinder-5th, participated, and there were many opportunities for multi-age learning. Here I'll post a few pics and videos from my classroom. Be sure to check out our whole-school "Journey to Mars" video.

A mysterious boxes arrives with a QR code to a welcome video... and information about how to build a robot to help us on our mission.

Robot prototypes...

Building our classroom robot...

Meet Mx26 - our guide to life on Mars!

Each classroom robot facilitated many of our incidents. We brought him to life with a bluetooth speaker and a voice changing app. The kids adored this character!

Our classroom was assigned to colonize the North Polar Ice Cap of mars along with 2 other classrooms (Kinder and 4/5). This was one of the ways we structured this all school storyline to provide ongoing opportunities for multi-age learning. Here a 3rd, 4th and Kinder are learning-teaching about Mars and our region together.

Then we needed to think about what the colonists would need once we got to Mars. Here is an image captured during a process drama (pictoral map). We were collectively brainstorming what would need to be inside our HAB on Mars.

Then, on to our frieze!

And our characters... (who ranged in age from 25-50)

Each student in the school had a badge to identify them as a colonist...

On launch day parents and friends gathered on the playground before school to wish the colonists goodbye. It looked like a real-life rocket launch party!

And now, the launch!

After we settled in to our new life on Mars, mysterious things started to happen. Here are some of the incidents our colonists encountered:

A need for food and an investigation of the variables involved in growing green beens.

Not long after, water levels were running low and we needed to engineer an ice-collecting attachment for our Sphero robots.

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A global dust storm that compromised our solar energy sources.

The discovery of potential life on Mars (a 3rd, 4th, 5th grader explore micro-organisms)!

Before we knew it, we were instructed to prepare for the arrival of NEW colonists. We had to teach them about everything we'd learned about the red planet and how to survive (culmination)...

This topic was such a labor of love for our school. Our teachers worked HARD to make this all happen and we did it with the incredible support of our parents and staff. There was a lot of hesitation going into this topic, but it proved to be HIGHLY engaging and extremely timely. If you haven't noticed, Mars is EVERYWHERE right now. It was so amazing to feel like we are a part of this great mission. 

One of my favorite memories of this storyline will be watching the Falcon Heavy launch LIVE from our classroom during lunch time. The whole school was a buzz as teachers had left their classrooms open to students who wanted to watch. Almost ALL did!