The girls in the Curious Jane Jr. Story Arts class at Berkeley Carroll are making pretty amazing progress on the stories they’re creating this week. This is especially impressive considering some of them have only just finished kindergarten!
In Story Arts Jr. there’s a lot of emphasis on the elements of a story. Each thing the girls make highlights a different element, which helps them as they work on making their books. They start with a character tree, where each character is drawn and the girls write a short profile for each to completely flesh them out. The next step is the settings map, which shows the places in the story and how they’re related to each other. If they want, they can recreate this map in a smaller version in their book. Then, after learning about story arcs and plot development, the girls make storyboards to show what happens in their stories.
One girl, Isabel, 6, told me about her character tree and settings map while she was working on her storyboard. In her story, SuperDog and SuperCat have to save the world from the Evil Doctor. They go to his castle where he has a secret lab to work on evil things so they can battle him and stop him from hurting people. When I asked her how SuperDog and SuperCat find the Evil Doctor, she told me, “Oh, they look at the map! It’s in the front of my book. They’ll look at it so they’ll know where to go.”
Isabel was still in the middle of her storyboard so I’m still not sure what will happen to SuperDog and SuperCat, but I can’t wait to find out!
