Jodi Schwartz, B.A.S.E. Animator

Throughout this snowy winter, B.A.S.E. daycare students at Gardenview and St. Monica elementary schools have been hard at work creating a collaborative storybook (one at each school) with their peers. This activity not only fostered communication, cooperation and compromise among the children, but it also developed and maintained extremely necessary life skills such as literacy, vocabulary expansion while building self-esteem.

The storybook creation development process involved several steps. The first phase in the project consisted of developing characters, settings, conflicts and personalities. The second phase encompassed recording the story narration as well as character voices, followed by sound effects. Once that had been completed, the third phase involved using an iPad to write one key word to accompany each drawing. Ms. Jodi Schwartz, the B.A.S.E. animator who facilitates the Storybook Creation Program used the words to develop a “Find the Hidden Message” game for the children to partake in after thier storybook viewing during the final class. 

Since voice recordings can only be achieved on an individual basis, Ms. Jodi prepared other activities for the rest of the group to complete while she took one child at a time to add their voice recordings. Examples of some of these activities included the following: (1) draw a mini-story on a paper divided into thirds with a focus on the beginning, the middle involving a conflict or obstacle, and an end involving a solution; (2) create a mini-book using a prepared stapled booklet focusing on morals and taking into consideration consistency of story line and characters. Students ran with the ideas and created some really innovative projects.

Long live literacy!