Chicken Little

Is Chicken Little an anxiety-ridden neurotic or is he simply voicing the sort of fears that all children experience? Leon Lenchner was interested in how young children handle the base emotions of stories. He chose to work with kindergarten children’s “fear stories” in this project, given their infantile handle on conflict resolution. He met with a small pull-out kindergarten group in the school library. Chicken Little was the jumping off point for discussing fears, rather than a story framework for retelling. Leon’s group developed individual stories from their own nightmares, about which they brainstormed to find a story solution. Their anxieties—from big dogs to getting lost—were solved within their stories, which were hand drawn in little paper doll 8-page books created from a single piece of paper folded in quarters. Leon typed their narrated stories as picture captions, which were pasted into the little books, and they were scanned into digitally manipulable form for children to program into presentations. The children chose which program they preferred to use, choosing between Kid Pix, PowerPoint and iMovie, and animated their stories. This told us that children can do simple programming before they can read alphabetically, given iconic navigation. The programming reinforced their learning to read as well as they encountered their own story text in multiple media: voice, paper, screen.