Today our class will make a movie. The movie will depict a day in the life of a fourth grader at our school. We are sending the movie to a Chinese elementary school so they can understand what our school is like.
We have a short window of time for our film creation, so this project will require focus.
A kind parent spent a day taking wonderful photos of the children's day at school. So today, we'll work together to combine maps, photos, music, title slides and short videos to tell a story about our school life.
We'll start by thinking about audience. What will these Chinese students want to know about our school, and how will we deal with the need for translation. Luckily we have a number of Chinese language speakers in our class.
After that, we'll divide into roles. Some will make the transition videos, others will design title slides and still more will create music using Garageband.
As students complete their tasks, I'll ask them to upload their creations to Google docs and share them with me. Then I'll work with a few classroom producers to place students' creations into our iMovie doc. We'll save the final project on both Google and YouTube for easy access.
Making a classroom movie is a great collaborative project with many avenues for student choice, creativity and expression. Have you made a class movie? If so, what topic did you tell a story about? How did your class collaborate? And what did you think was most important with regard to your audience?
Once the project is complete, I'll share it for your entertainment and critique.
Movie Note
In about four hours of collaborative, creative time the students and I pulled together this film. Students wrote short scripts, videotaped introduction, created music, made transition slides and edited the film with my guidance. We learned a lot about making a film and we'll apply our learning for our next project, films about endangered species -- stay tuned.
Take a Look at Our Film
School Day in USA
