Jenny has been using Kidspiration to make picnic scenes. I suggested that she should try a visual diorama next. A visual diorama is a background photo placed on one slide in PowerPoint
and then children find graphics that have no backgrounds and place them on the photo. They can build up a story by what they place on the photo background. This is the ideal opportunity to teach children how to resize and move graphics on the page. More able students could also learn how to move graphics behind and front of other graphics. This is also the ideal time to identify those visual spatial students, the ones who are aware of space and perspective.
An extension to this activity is to use the presenter note space below the slide. Children can type a story here, this could be a draft or the final published view.
To print it out, make sure when you go File - Print and select the Notes option
.
It will print out looking like this.
Or you could add lines to the Presenter note space using a simple trick like this
 | Click in the Note space |
| set your font size to at least 26 |
| hold down your Shift key |
| tap or hold down the minus/underscore key on the keyboard |
| the page will fill up with lines |
| this can then
be printed out and the children can write directly onto the lines |
This is a great
writing motivator for children as they create their own stories out of the
pictures they have chosen.