Maps as an organising structure for a story

Well, I am back in the UK after having spent one month in Mexico, and we have started the new session of DigiStory. It was quite hard coming back from the sun into darkness and rain, but the children, and the challenge of preparing materials for 6 new sessions of storytelling soon put back the spring in my step.

Andrea Wollard, my collegue and co-conspirator in DigiStory came up with the brilliant idea of using maps as a natural way to help children structure their story. We soon started researching appropriate maps and got 5 maps of popular characters for the children to chose from. Some of the maps were from well know stories such as Narnia, or Winnie the Pooh and Pokemon. The map of this imaginary world was done by Christing-o. To our amazement the children soon took to the idea of using the maps as a natural way to structure the stories that they are creating. It is early days in our exploration of the use of maps, but this little trial certainly looked promising. I am thinking of making a comparison between storyboarding which has been our tried and tested way of helping the children organise their materials and ideas into an ordered sequence, and maps as an organising structure.