In the Classroom: The Pushcart War Project

I’m a big fan of whole class creative projects celebrating works of literature.  Some have come about due to my passion for a particular book, notably Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, while others are due to the kids’ excitement, say the murals we did for The Graveyard Book and When You Reach Me.  The latest of these is a digital storytelling project of Jean Merrill’s The Pushcart War.

It was upon learning of the death of its author, Jean Merrill, a couple of years ago that I was reminded of her fabulous book and the play I’d done of it with a class long ago. Having seen a colleague’s PuppetPals project, I thought it might be just right for digital storytelling of The Pushcart War.

I began by reading the book aloud while the kids followed along in books. Sometimes they participated in the reading, but often it was just me doing the reading. We talked about the book as we did so. And they loved it, eagerly look forward to the days when we continued the story.

This being the second year we’d done the project, we teachers realize the kids needed some experience with PuppetPals before diving in. And so we did a mini-practice-project first with a favor book of my class this year, Sam & Dave Dig a Hole.  They were put into groups of three and four and each assigned a few pages. We made the puppets (Sam, Dave, dog, cat, tree), the kids made the backgrounds, and then they made the little puppet shows. After that we all critiqued them together so they would see what worked for the bigger project.

We then brainstormed all the backgrounds needed for The Pushcart War and had the kids make them. My inspiration was Mo Willems’ Knuffle Bunny where the backgrounds were photos and the characters cartoons. For us, the backgrounds were collaged black and white photos. We had some that kids had taken and they searched for others in some copyright free data bases. Next came the characters. Again, we brainstormed all possible ones. Then the children made them, using brads for the limbs so they could be moved about. Lastly, the kids chose their favorite sections of the story from which I put them in small groups to create the actual movies. They came out so well!  You can see them all here.

 

 

 

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