On Fridays, students are usually in a rush to go home after 4th block, excited to start the weekend- but not today! Today 12 third graders headed to the lower school computer lab right after school. I was there, waiting- ready to begin my first session of the much awaited Brent Bytes! I started the first part of the session with an introduction to the club. I prepared a slideshow to talk about what it is, its goals, projects and timeline.
Beginning our first project - Book Trailers
After the introduction, I went right ahead and discussed our first project, book trailers. We talked about what book trailers were, why they even exist and why we needed to make this for the younger members of our community. All the How-to's will be discussed in our next session, when we begin using the macs. We defined book trailers as a video advertisement for a book which is used to motivate young readers to read more books.
For this project, students will be working in pairs.
For this project, students will be working in pairs.
We headed to the library which was just across the computer room. The first task I gave the students was to pick a book of their choice to do their trailer on based on the ELC's unit theme this month (farm animals,creepy crawlies, insects). The kids were so excited while choosing books. They were so busy asking each other questions like, "Do you think they would like this?" "Can we make this look exciting in a book trailer?" "Is this too hard/easy for them?" "What books are interesting for 4 and 5 year olds?" After students had selected their books (most of them picked books that they have read in the past), I gave everyone about 5 minutes to reread the books to refresh their memories. Then, I met with them to talk about creating scenes for their book trailers. Since it will be their first time to create a trailer, I limited the number of scenes to 6 . I also provided them with a sample format which they can freely use to suit their needs. Check out the sample I made and some of the kids' scenes.