An activity we did for our tech class is an activity I hope to do with my own students some day. I enjoyed this activity because I really do feel like it can build classroom community, collaboration, and promotes creativity amongst individual students.

First, we watched the this read-a-loud YouTube video of the story Not a Box by Antoinette Portis.

Not a Box: The Animation

This is the one I did 👑

After you make your “Not a Box” picture using Google Draw, you can go to File –> Download As, and click on the option that allows you to save your drawing as a .jpeg image onto your computer.

Once, each student has their picture saved as a .jpeg, each student can then upload their picture to a sharable Google Slides link. This creates a “Not a box” digital story made by each student in the class! The following link is to the story made by my tech class:

Not a Box!

This activity is meaningful for students as they have each made a page to their digital story. They can share it with their friends and family and keep it for as long as they would like to as it is digital and can be saved to any device. This activity includes language arts as well as the arts curriculum, allowing students to use a wide variety have creative skills.

This type of activity can be manipulated and expanded into other activities. For example, the story Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss has a lot of repetition and rhyming words. It would be interesting to see a classroom of students working on a variation of Green Eggs and Ham where each page is a new rhyme, similar to the original story, however the students create the rhymes. For example “Would you eat them with a cat? Would you eat them wearing a hat?” could be a new rhyme for digital story of Green Eggs and Ham.

Could you see yourself doing this activity with students? What digital story would you make with your students?