Theo, Chloe Paloma, Ren, Max, Alice and Zoe K. had an idea for a story about two princesses: Ava and Isabella. They live in a castle with their mother and father, the Queen and King, and their brother, Prince Jack. They also wanted to feature a grandma, who lives in a hotel castle in New York. Since the children have previous knowledge of partner drawing, and are accustomed to our classroom culture of collaboration, they started with a partner book. The teachers quickly recognized the children were seamlessly allowing all of their ideas to flow together.
Their ideas enveloped their day, discussions, in drawings, and dramatic play in the story theater. Eventually they wanted to make a movie rather than a book. We discussed the movie making process, giving them words for development/pre-production and meetings have begun. Based on other development meetings in the past, the teachers anticipated a lot more disagreeing than agreeing, however, because a lot of the groundwork had been done about the characters in their story, the children already had ideas of how the movie should progress.
They have drawn and sequenced all of their scenes. There were 3 possible ideas for an ending: Theo suggested one of his original ideas from 6 months ago that he had for the book, while Chloe and Max had more suggestions.
Theo: The prince is going to the cafe and then he’s going to go home. Ava says, ‘hello’ to him at the cafe and then a big motorcycle comes-bigger than a tow truck and a storm comes and there’s a flood and he floats upside down.
Chloe: Isabella goes to the store to get blueberries, strawberries, oranges and apples.
Max: What if at the end they’re just reading a book about themselves?
Ren: I feel like I want to do all of the friends’ ideas. It would be Chloe’s then Theo’s then Max.
Max’s insightful, clever and playful idea seems so fitting and meaningful. He really thought about our timely process coming full circle from the book to the movie and wanted to incorporate this significance of the journey. The continuous thread of our classroom culture of collaboration continues to be woven through the children’s work. This group worked so diligently together to complete their script, and Ren had such a synergistic embrace of all of the ideas for their ending. The children excitedly agreed and we celebrated, realizing the ‘script’ for the movie had been finalized. We are enthusiastic to begin making our props and sets, then starting production in the next few weeks, in hopes of finishing the movie by graduation. -Teacher Melanie