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!

You Need Love

At the beginning of this spring's First Peoples of the NW Coast storyline, we built a coastline and lush coastal forest.  Before adding humans, I asked the students what people might need to survive there.  I knew I'd elicit the requisite information I needed to elaborate scientifically: food, water, shelter.  My students are so much smarter than I.  They knew it takes more to build a life than the bare essentials.  Here are some of their responses:

Thank goodness they are my guides through the wilderness.

-ACCESS Academy, Portland Public Schools, Grade 4, 2017.

National Parks All School Storyline - Friezes

We are currently about 2/3rds of the way through an all school storyline: National Parks. I thought it might be a good opportunity to share our frieze work... Almost the same topic, but such variety...

Kindergarten Friezes:

Glacier Bay National Park

Denali National Park

Olympic National Park

Now, on to 1st Grade frieze work:

Grand Teton National Park

Redwood National Park

Biscayne National Park

And our 2nd and 3rd blends:

Bryce Canyon National Park

Everglades National Park

Acadia National Park

Yellowstone National Park

Carlsbad Caverns... with a cave full of bats!

And last, but not least, our 4th and 5th grade blends...

Hawaii Volcano National Park

Yosemite National Park

Glacier National Park

Mt. Lassen National Park

Novel-Based Topic: Kneeknock Rise

This fall my students and I explored the world of Natalie Babbit's novel, Kneeknock Rise. Many are familiar with Tuck Everlasting, for which Babbitt is most known. I would argue that Kneeknock Rise is equally as wonderful. And it is an especially perfect novel on which to base a storyline. It seems like half the work in writing a book-based topic is finding the right book. After you do, the storyline writes itself.

This novel gave us opportunities to incorporate the following curriculum: Close/Complex Reading, Vocabulary, Narrative Writing (this book is an amazing mentor-text!), Non-Fiction Reading, Fact and Opinion (legendary creatures reading and reports), Basic Economics (community study), Drama, States of Matter and Thermal-Geyser Science, Opinion Speeches... as you can see, it's one rich storyline!

Please enjoy a photographic explanation...


After doing a repeated close-read of the first 4 pages of our novel, we created prototypes for our frieze. We considered all the ideas of what needed to be included and the we set about creating the setting of our story...

















Sponge painting what would become the countryside that "lay as flat as it had been knocked unconscious."



And the stormy sky!



The homes for the "Village of Instep."



Putting it all together - notice the Megrimum's cave at the top of Kneeknock Rise.

And now, it was time to explore the main characters of our story... Each team looked for descriptions in the text to support their design of each of the 7 main characters. Then, they went to work creating the 3-dimensional characters...

Step one: covering wire base with tape and newspaper.



Step two: using plaster wrap to give our characters a hardened shell.



Step three: adding clay and pain to the hands, face and feet.



After adding cloth for clothes (gotta love a glue gun!) our characters were ready for display. The written "reports" behind each character was completed by each team based on text evidence.

We also created personal "villager" characters - paper dolls that went on the frieze.

Next, things started to happen (Incidents) in the Village of Instep...



Here we are, as "villages" asking Aunt Gertrude about her encounter with the Megrimum the night before. Next, we created artwork and poetry about what WE believe the Megrimum to look like...

And here are scenes from the Instep Fair, where our village makes most of our money every year. There were a lot of "Megrimum" items sold to visitors who come to hear the moans of the mysterious creature...





At the end of the fair, Ada dared Egan to climb the rise to see the Megrimum for himself. Egan rose to the challenge and so we sent out a search party...

Here, we are moving our characters closer to the top of the rise (and adding some thought bubbles to show what the villagers think about Egan's choice to climb the rise).
















Then, we actually climbed the rise to find Egan, calling for him and ringing our bells to keep the Megrimum away.

At the top, we read the next part of the story and found out, just like Egan did, that there actually isn't any Megrimum at the top of the rise. The moaning is actually a geyser in a cave!

Some wanted to keep believing, though...



Next we learned about geysers and investigated the change from liquid to gas (expansion!)...





We made predictions about Egan's choice to plug the geyser up in order to prove to the villagers they were wrong all along about there being a Megrimum. Egan found that most villagers were reluctant to believe him. They chose to keep believing in the Megrimum... they had good reasons to support their opinions, too!

After the story was complete, we worked on further developing our performance for culmination. Here are some images from culmination...