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A message from the director to Parents and Teachers Hello, My name is Roberto Lione and I welcome you to the wonderful world of Paper-‐motion, a unique style of animation I created twenty years ago for a research project in "Distant Learning" that I directed in association with the University of Perugia, Italy, the University of Salzburg, Austria, and the communications company Eutelsat, France. Producing and directing children's animation and educational programs has been a wonderful experience for my life in the past twenty years. The project promoted the development of new teaching and communications tools to introduce children to reading. Actually paper-‐motion is a spin-‐off of stop motion, the technique use by Tim Burton in A Nightmare Before Christmas and by British director Nick Park in Wallace and Gromit. Naturally all of us work with Digital as well as with film. My Taco & Taco paper-‐motion shorts are the stars of READING WORKSHOP. Millions of children around the world have already been watching them from year 2000 to 2010, starting with RAI-‐TV (Italian Public Television) my co-‐producer, to South Korea EBS (Educational Broadcasting System) whose main counterparts are PBS, as well as the BBC. In 2014, I decided to bring Taco & Paco to North America after listening to my grand children in Plano, Texas. I live and work in Italy as well as in the United States where I spent many years in New York City as a television producer/director. It has been shown over and over again that Taco and Paco, with their award winning animation technique, appeal to children age 4 to 5 and age 6 to 8 for different reasons. Younger children are attracted by the colors and the unique style of animation, and they watch the stories over and over. The older children, in addition to this, appreciate and follow the story and the dialogues. I also make paper-‐motion animations for older children. In fact one of the most gratifying spontaneous compliments I've received in the course of my career was at the Chicago International Children's Film Festival, where the Children's Jury awarded me 1st Prize for the feature film in paper-‐motion ‘Kate, The Taming of the Shrew’. The audience and the jury were composed of children ages 10 to 13. I still remember those three little girls coming up to me to ask if "I ever got discouraged during production for making such complex animation". So thoughtful, I was touched. I never got discouraged in the course of my creative work, but it sure has always been demanding. My suggestions to make the most of Reading Workshop is to have you and the children watch the story a couple of times, then you, the teacher/parent, will read the story out loud after downloading the script. Try to keep the same intonation heard in the sound track. Then ask the child/children to do the same. They can continue practicing on their own, listening to the audio on the headset while reading the script. Naturally, being a working script used to record the dialogues, the description of the scene has not been recorded. The pupil can skip this part and concentrate on the dialogue, which is printed in bold type. It will be up to you to discuss and explain to the pupils the meaning of words they do not know. I also recommend working on developing the skills that will make the child "read like a detective" while hunting for evidence. You can do so by applying the code of the five W's -‐ who, what, when, where and why -‐ both for the understanding and the ability to find answers in the story just watched. ° Identifying the main theme of the story and then pointing out key details and explaining how these details interact in the development of the story. ° Explaining how specific images contribute information to the theme of the story. The child will then have to recall the images when reading the script. ° Describing the logical order of how the information is given such as presenting the problem, then listing the causes and then how the story arrives to the solution. These exercises can really be fun but at the same time it can be tough for the child to play detective. The answer is: try and perhaps try, try again.