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Telling Stories with Words and Digital Photography
    Everyone loves to take pictures!  At Expo this year, all the fifthand sixth graders participated in a project which combined work onwriting skills, understanding cultural differences, and digitalphotography.  In Room 209, we spent January, 2008 thinking about theconnection between photography and storytelling.

•  We read picture book examples where photographs or paintings helped tell a story.

• Speakers from the International Center of Minnesota presented aspectsoftheir culture and family in a series of classroom visits to Expo.Chelsea Wu visited our classroom and shared stories about her life inTaiwan.  Click here to read her piece about her piano lessons.

• We interviewed professional photojournalist Kevin Rivoli at his home inupstate New York, using Skype communication software.  He is creating abook and traveling exhibition which relates his photographs of everydaylife to the paintings of Norman Rockwell.  He told us that goodphotographers find their subjects through patience, by finding a goodsetting and waiting to see what happens in it. Click here to see his photographs.

• Room 209 studentsused digital cameras to photograph their own routines and rituals, thenadded the photos to their writer's notebooks. Students chose one of thephotos andused the writing process to create a published story based on theimage.  Click on student names in the sidebar to read their pieces.

• Students used Scratch computer programming software to make a slideshowof several of their photographs.  This included learning how to programtransitions between slides and adding voice-over commentary.  Theseprojects will be posted at http://scratch.mit.edu/users/room209 byearly March.

This project was supported by a grant from Ecolab's Vision for Learning program.