The PLACES Project

Empowerment and building relationships with other age groups

Themes and Learning Objectives

  • Orality
  • Older students telling a story to pre-school students
  • Storytelling using “Dragondancers” and “Stonesoup”.
Nymarken Skole og Børnehus

Location: Kerteminde, Denmark

Pupils involved: 28 pupils

Age Group: 9-11 years old

Lesson: Danish

Implementation Procedures

First, the class watched Dragondancers without its ending. Afterwards, the students created their own endings in groups. They wrote down their endings, and each group presented them to the whole class. 

Materials and tools used

The PLACES video stories, paper, colours.

Then they talked about good endings, emphasizing that there are many possibilities. Finally, they watched the PLACES ending, fully aware that no ending is better than another.
Next, the class watched and discussed Stonesoup. The students were told that they would need to retell the story themselves. They were very nervous about that, so the teacher told them: “I will tell it my own way, and you can do it in yours.” This made the task less intimidating since they saw their teacher doing it differently from how it was shown in the video.
The students have familiarized themselves with the story and practiced their own versions, adding personal details and emphasizing different elements.
The class then invited preschool children to the storytelling session, as a kindergarten is located on the same premises as the school.
The preschoolers were welcomed and divided among the existing groups in the class. In each group, the second-grade students told their own version of Stonesoup to the preschoolers in their group. Some of them had, on their own initiative, found stones with holes in them on the school playground and included them in the story.
This made it a more intimate experience, and all the groups’ versions of the story were shared.
After the storytelling, the second-grade students asked the preschoolers to draw scenes from the story. They drew vegetables, a campervan, apple trees, and even a comic strip. Some worked together, while others worked alone. This extended their interaction and created opportunities for the students to discuss elements of the story further.

Sharing Outcomes and Experiences

The aim of the lesson was to build relationships across age groups, to practice with others the experience of sharing a story, and to train students to come forward and not to hide behind a book in order to tell a story.
All this has been an entertaining and maturity-building experience. Students have become more courageous and helpful towards each other during the entire PLACES process. They went from being nervous and scared, to finding it fun and feeling proud of what they could do themselves and of their helpfulness towards one another.