The Picture Tells the Story
When our son was in 2nd grade, we found out he had a visual processing issue that caused his eyes to jump from one line of text to another when he was reading/writing. His eyes jumped around on the page and, understandably, this caused him great frustration. Up until this time he’d been a natural born storyteller who always begged for numerous bedtime stories. He was a proud library card holder and made short plays/movies with his stuffed animals (and his filmmaking parents). Having difficulty as an early reader/writer was something that quickly became a HUGE frustration for him and it began to tank his confidence.
While working with a specialist to address his reading/writing challenges, my husband and I decided to bring the joy back to story time and show our son the fun ways that filmmakers use to develop our stories with pictures. One of our favorite activities was called, “The Picture Tells the Story.” For this easy activity we would grab some paper and our art supplies. Each of us would come up with a story we wanted to tell. Then, we’d put on some music (drawing/learning is always better with tunes!) and we’d do our best to draw all of the story elements in one picture “frame.”
Prompt questions we used to get him thinking about story elements:
Setting: Where does the story take place?
Main Character: Who is the hero of your story?
Plot: What does the main character want?
Conflict: What is the difficulty/problem/challenge they are facing in the story?
Action: What will they do to solve the problem?
Resolution: How does the story end?
Movie Poster Examples
A fun, movie related strategy we used to clarify this activity was to look at movie posters. As marketing tools, movie posters have to use just one picture to attract their audience. That one image must include a good deal of information about their story. We’d look at posters for some his favorite films, Finding Nemo, How to Train Your Dragon and Kiki’s Delivery Service. Talking about these images gave our son an idea of how filmmakers think about pictures and storytelling in their most concentrated form. He was delighted to think like a movie maker and began to feel more excited about storytelling again.
One of our favorite examples was the poster for the short animated film “One Small Step.” This charming short by Taiko studios tells the story of Luna, a young Chinese American girl who dreams of becoming an astronaut. The poster is simple, but effective. It does a beautiful job of communicating the story setting, tone, main character and plot (her desire to go to the moon!).
Watch the 8-minute film here to see the connection between the image and complete story.
This drawing exercise gave our young writer an alternative way of expressing his stories. It relieved some of his writing frustrations and also gave us a fun way to spend a Sunday afternoon together. Seeing his enthusiasm and confidence grow, we began to introduce graphic novels like Captain Underpants, Dog Man and Wings of Fire to encourage him to use his visual storytelling skills even more. Now at 14-years-old, he identifies as a young writer and continues to love storytelling, reading and drawing.
I tell you all of this from the perspective of a parent whose child was struggling with words on the page. A parent who was worried that her child might lose the love for reading and writing. A parent who found a way to encourage her child to not let go of his love of stories. And, after teaching nearly 400 students in the Movie Bites Club, I can tell you that nearly all of our learners find joy in drawing out their ideas. Those who have challenges and those who don’t. There’s a magic to seeing our ideas come to life in images…especially when we begin to imagine those ideas coming to life as a movie on the big screen. Just the thought of it gets our creative mind active again! Give The Picture Tells a Stroy activity a whirl and email us at hello@moviebiteslearning.com to let us know how it goes. We hope you have as much fun as we do.
Supply List:
Crayons/Markers/Colored Pencils
Paper
Magnet (to display the artwork on the fridge afterwards!)
Free Template: If you’d like to print out the FREE Movie Bites movie poster template you can download it from our Resources page. Enjoy!)
Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, MBL earns from qualifying purchases on some links.
