Level: Grades 1 to 6

Overview

This lesson is one of a five-part unit that provides teachers with ideas for teaching TV in the elementary classroom. In this lesson, students explore the ways in which television tells stories.

Learning Outcomes

Students will:

• understand that media products can tell a story
• recognize that characters, mood, setting and plot are part of a media story
• tell or re-tell a story using different media
• appreciate that there are different ways to tell the same story
• identify television stories
• compare/contrast TV stories with other stories
• construct a storyboard

Preparation and Materials

• Before class, obtain a video of a novel that students are studying or have recently studied

Procedure

The key idea of this lesson is that television products use film techniques to tell stories through the development of characters, narrative, mood and setting - in order to elicit emotional and intellectual responses from audiences.

Television allows us to experience a story without reading a book. Television stories are similar to, and different from, the same stories found in books.

The following activities help students explore how television is similar to, and different from, other forms of story telling.

Visual Novels

• Choose an appropriate "visual novel" (a film based on a book) to study with the class. Deconstruct how visual and audio effects are used to develop character, plot, setting, etc.
• Using a Venn diagram, have students compare and contrast the treatment of this story in its novel form, and its visual form.
• Discuss which version of the story appears to be more "real."

Films

Use the stop/frame device on a film projector to show students that films and videos are made up of multiple pictures that create moving pictures.

Short Stories

• After experiencing a TV story, sequence events using pictures and storyboards.

Comics

• Have students cut several comic strips from a newspaper, and cut out the dialogue.
• Choose some of the pictures to make a storyboard.
• Have students insert their own dialogue.

Book Reports

• Give a book report in the form of a TV program and videotape.

Filmstrips

• Making filmstrips to communicate a story is an excellent way for students to learn the correlation between pictures and dialogue (recorded on tape recorders).
• An alternative is to make a cardboard TV and draw pictures on paper placed on rollers.

Evaluation

• Evaluation can be based on completed storyboards, completed assignments for the visual novel, recognition of similarities and differences between TV stories and books.