Stone Sandwiches
Grade: Kindergarten
School: Sloane Public School
Teacher: My-Linh Hang
Kindergarten teachers implicitly understand multimodality. Children in the kindergarten classroom typically engage in hands-on activities, such as making puppets, singing songs, and painting pictures so the project of learning a story and then personalizing it though multimodal retelling can be comfortably implemented in the kindergarten classroom where the curriculum supports embodied learning. But this is a big project for little minds and hands, and My-Linh Hang’s extraordinarily well-planned, multi-step journey from the traditional story of Stone soup through local field trips and community involvement into the international perspectives underlying the novel multiple retellings of Stone sandwiches is documented in her interview and in the comic rendering of the journey. In this extraordinary learning experience for children just beginning school are found opportunities to bring together school and community learning, to include international perspectives and home languages, and to introduce children just entering the classroom to the world at large at their doorsteps. The comic rendering of Stone sandwiches not only gives children the opportunity to put their voices on the page, but it documents the entire learning journey in a way that can be read by parents as well as teachers and researchers.