Playshop

During a recent session with a five-year-old preschooler, he and I created a collaborative movie involving props, characters, and settings.  Previously, I had worked with this child on reading, writing, and drawing, so integrating these activities into the creation of a story shouldn't have been too difficult.  As I final condition to the project, we used the popular film/merchandise franchise Star Wars as the backdrop to our story-making.

In my earlier literacy work with this child, it became apparent that collaborative story-making was right up his alley.  During my first writing activity with him, I found that he needed to work with another person to make the story as he wrote and drew.  For him, stories were not just a thing that flowed from his mind to the paper, but rather a plastic discussion and a social event.  This lent itself nicely to the activity currently under discussion as we set about creating hand-drawn character cutouts, whole-page backgrounds, and props.

As he created the characters, he created the story, and as he created the story, he created more characters.  It was a looping process.  Finally, a more or less stable version of the story seemed to have emerged involved a lava monster who calls on Jay and Kitty Paw Paw Sidekick, as well as Emperor Palpatine and General Grevous at their house.

During filming, however, it seemed that simultaneous manipulation of the objects and narration were impossible.  Without breaks for narration during filming, the story started to change owing to a lack of grounding.  In a future session, we would need to perhaps sit down and write out the story to be narrated by a third party (not only was he unable to simultaneously narrate and manipulate, but I also was unable to simultaneously narrate and operate the camera!).