Once Upon a Classroom . . . : Education: Some instructors are experimenting with new teaching method designed to integrate subjects.

This summer, Nancy Myers’ third- and fourth-grade students built a desert in their Camarillo classroom, with green papier-mache cacti, pink crepe-paper flowers, and puffy white cotton clouds on a blue construction-paper sky.

Myers is one of a group of Ventura County elementary-school teachers who are spending summer school experimenting with a new teaching method called storyline, a technique that seeks to integrate science, social studies and other subjects by having students delve deeply into one subject.

Over a period of weeks, Myers’ class built a frieze of a desert national park, populated it with the types of animals and people who would live in or visit such a place and devised narrative plots for their created characters.

Myers’ summer-school class are all gifted students, but she plans to use the storyline method in the coming school year with regular third-grade classes at Bedford Open School.

The storyline technique works well with all levels of students, Myers said, because it brings academic subjects to life.

“It’s almost real,” she said. “It is real.”

Created in Europe 25 years ago, the storyline technique is used widely in Oregon and Washington states, but Ventura County schools are the first in California to adopt the new educational method, said Eileen Vopelak, a staff development worker for the county superintendent.

Nearly 90 teachers from elementary schools around the county have taken one-week training courses on the teaching technique through the county superintendent of schools office this summer, Vopelak said.

Although the county has offered other storyline courses over the past three years, previous classes didn’t attract as much interest. “Now it’s beginning to be much more popular,” Vopelak said.

One reason the storyline method has caught the attention of county teachers is it helps fulfill a new state goal to integrate school curricula and make academics more meaningful for students, she said.

“What you’re doing is tapping into the child’s enthusiasm for story-making,” Vopelak said. “We tell stories all the time. Stories are how we express ourselves.”

For Simi Valley teacher Lana Fricke, whose 5th-grade summer school class built a rain forest at Justin School, the storyline method allowed her to blend science, art and other subjects into one overarching narrative, breaking down the artificial boundaries that traditionally separate different school subjects.

“We have pigeonholed 30 minutes for reading, 20 minutes for writing, 20 minutes for spelling,” Fricke said. “You’re learning in bits and pieces and it doesn’t tie into anything. It’s kind of phony. This way it all flows into everything.”

Fricke began her storyline project by asking her students to name the types of plants, animals and people, from native tribes to lumber workers, that would be found in a rain forest.

The idea, she and other teachers said, is to create the storyline from what students already know and what they learn in the course of the project.

“That’s the beauty of this whole program,” Myers said. “I don’t come in with books about the desert and say ‘I’m going to teach everything.’ I say, ‘OK, what do we know?’ ”

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And as each class builds its storyline setting, many students begin to feel a sense of ownership in their work, leading them to seek to expand their knowledge, teachers said.

Some students turn to their class texts, which teach them to use books for research in the same way that college students do, teachers said. One of Myers’ students, Amy McLeod, 10, said, “We’ve learned about the desert, the animals, the plants.”

Then, in creating their storyline frieze, students use math to measure the paper, crepe and other construction materials; art to design the project; and writing to compose journals of their experience.

And the learning doesn’t stop there.

In every storyline project, something happens, often an incident that threatens to destroy the paradise each class has just finished creating.

Susan Piott’s kindergarten class at Las Colinas, for example, came to school one morning to find that litter had nearly wiped out all living things on the wall-to-wall beach the class had built.

After coming to school early that day, Piott slid plastic rings from six-pack containers over the necks of colorful paper birds, stapled plastic onto the mouths of bodies of cutout fish, and then placed all of the creatures flat on the floor to show that they had died.

When the students came in, Piott said, some were upset at the condition of the beach.

“They really do have ownership in it,” she said. “It’s theirs. It’s their beach.”

After discussing where litter comes from and what it does to animals, the children decided to try to prevent future problems by building trash cans and posting signs on their homemade pier warning people not to litter.

Such incidents are a key element of the storyline method, Vopelak said

Not only do these events, which are often threatening to storyline characters or settings, lead the children to use their problem-solving skills, they also maintain the students’ interest in the project.

“Just like in a book, you have incidents that happen that pique your interest,” Vopelak said.

And judging from the responses of many students, they were indeed interested in their storyline projects.

“It’s better than looking in books,” said Peter So, a 10-year-old from Simi Valley in Fricke’s class.

Or, as 9-year-old Jacob Roskelley from Camarillo put it: “This is much funner than school.”