Curriculum pages for each film!

Students love our scrappy stop motion films!  Activities include a variety of group and individual projects such as :

* Comparative literature (comparing oral, written, and film versions of the story)

* Creative response -- writing or filming my own version of the story

* Analyzing the written, oral, and film texts

* Role play and interviewing characters from the story

* Social emotional themes

* Exploring other subjects related to the film.

  Includes other resource links and a download links for the films.  

Five lessons for all five films!  

.....Wood, Theron, and Mayaba (2012) conducted empirical research on the use of folktales with children orphaned by AIDS in South Africa. Implementing a pre-test/post-test qualitative methodology, they used the telling of 22 culturally relevant traditional stories as their intervention. Stories represented the Xhosa background of the children, and were chosen for their representation of themes related to Masten’s model of resilience (Wood et al., 82 2012). 

One story was told each week; researchers did not interact with the children after the telling, in order to control for the effect of external relationship-building.

Themes that emerged were evidence of increased self-efficacy and stronger emotional relationships with others among the participants. While the researchers acknowledged that the complexity of resilience did not allow for straight-forward causal conclusions about these changes, they noted that the children’s spontaneous acting-out of the stories after the researchers had left the orphanage added to the credence of their findings, since this was additional evidence of the children’s sense of agency, and their growing cohesion as a group.