Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Creating stories through media


This past week I worked on an interesting project involving media and play. I decided to work with one of the first grade students and have him create his own movie using happy meal toys that I had brought in for him to use. This was a wonderful experience for me as a future literacy teacher because I witnessed the excitement and creativity from the student while he was practicing literacy skills.
As I gave the student a handful of toys, representing cartoon characters or movie characters, he jumped right in to planning process. While he mostly explained his big idea, I would normally have students plan their movie through writing.  What I thought would take some time to figure out was the story line of this movie, however I was pleasantly surprised at how this student knew more about these toy figures than I did. The student created names and used different voices for each toy as he created his story. While it was a simple story about four super heroes playing hide and go seek tag, there was so much richness for literacy in that. This student had created the beginning, middle, and end of a story, which told me he knew the basic structure. Not only did this student sequence his story, but he created characters and gave each toy a different personality, I was pretty impressed.

After I was done filming the raw footage on my iPad, I told the student that I was going to add sound effects, and music through my iMovie program. While this is the exciting part for most students, I soon understood why. I had a lot of fun editing and adding fun elements to enhance this students movie. I think that having students create their own iMovie is an excellent tool to use in the classroom for students to practice using literacy. Teachers can use this to teach students about different genres, and also have them practice their writing skills. Using the iMovie is a great incentive at the end of a writing process. I think that for older elementary students this could be a great individual or group project for students. I would have students work on this individually as an activity for the students who finish their work early. Instead of giving students more worksheets as a done early choice, I would have them work on their story writing. One thing to be careful with as a teacher is to monitor the quality of writing. I think it can be easy for students to rush through the writing part just to start filming and editing, however iMovie would be the reward for when the writing piece is perfect.

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