An Animated Story Created by a Group of Young Children

This paper contributes to the contemporary focus on literacy and digital stories in early childhood education and care (ECEC) institutions. When a group of young children create an animated story together, they might collaborate, both with their peers and with their teacher. By drawing on social semiotic multimodal perspectives as the theoretical framework, the purpose of this paper is to describe and explore how different modalities and narrative devices contribute to the development of an animated story created by six children (aged 4-5 years) and a teacher in collaboration. The study is a qualitative case study, focusing on contemporary events in a Norwegian kindergarten. The empirical material consists of video-recorded field observations of the process as well as the final product. Through an inductive exploration of the development of verbal narrative, three analytical strands are identified: (i) verbal narrative in the final product, (ii) multimodal narrative in the final product, and (iii) narrative devices applied by the children during the process. The findings demonstrate the importance of including and considering the process, the product, narrative devices and all the modalities--in particular the kineikonic mode--when creating an animated story with young children. An implication of these findings is for ECE teachers and researchers to acknowledge and integrate all the various aspects that contribute to the final product when young children create animated stories.