What is this about?

Narrative or story is very important in religion and appears at the core of most RE syllabuses and these stories are often interesting to children. Recreating stories is a very good way of exploring both the contents and the meaning of texts allowing children to develop thinking of skills including comprehension, analysis and evaluation.

Practical Issues

Access to significant amount of technology including (possibly) mobile or table technologies - or checking that children have access to these technologies outside of the classroom. It can be useful for the teacher to have curated sets of multi-media resources for the children to use as large amounts of time can be spend doing this elsewise.

Activity Description

Get the children to explore a range of religious or spiritual stories (there are many of these online but some sources can be seen in the web links section below. The children can then re-create these stories using the available IT resources (see below). The task can be developed in order to get children to consider both the retelling of the stories or deeper textual analysis. The use of technology allows the children to:

• incorporate a range of multi-media (images, video, animations, audio, interactive)
• develop non-linear as well as linear narratives
• work more collaborative using tools such as Google Docs or Dropbox

ICT resource used

• Desktop Publishing software such as Pages or Publisher
• File sharing software including cloud sharing
• Book creation software (such as Creative Book Builder)

Learning Objectives

Depending on the age of the children there are a wide range of LOs that this might cover some of these are:

• To engage with stories and extracts from religious literature and talk about their meanings
• To Explore the stories about the lives and teaching of key religious figures
• To Hear and respond to stories and to ask questions about these stories and their significance to believers
• To Listen and respond to stories highlighting the morals and values of believers in practice
• Investigate stories about god(s) and faith investigate how this helps them make sense about life
• Explore religious stories and teachings about the environment and identify their impact on behaviour

Commentary on the ICT use

Technology allows children to make their own versions of existing stories as well as develop new stories there are a number of affordances that technology gives these include:

• The including of multimedia elements
• Drafting and re-drafting (allowing for formative and constructive feedback)
• Options for collaboration
• The creation of e-books as well as p-books which are easier to share and distribute
• The options for others to comment on and develop these artefacts

The creations of these stories is not limited to the "paper" medium (or its electronic replacement) we can easily now use video or animation to recreate stories and tablet technologies especially with the built in video and cheap (or free) video editing allow for the creation of video narrative very easily.

• British Library Illustrated Stories: http://www.bl.uk/learning/cult/sacred/stories/