Letting Students Shine

Tomorrow is the first gathering of our new stop motion video club which has now been named Scotty Dog Productions.  I must say I am full of excitement and nerves as I have never actually made one myself but have seen plenty of examples, read blogs about and discussed them with others.  Word surfaced at school of a 5th grader who has developed a passion for stop motion videos and it was suggested to approach him as a support person for this journey. Tony (over at Learn Me Sumthin') and I agreed we would approach him with the idea of being a mentor to kids in the group.

The art teacher had shown me one of the movies this student had created and I was very impressed by it.  He had created a scene that could have taken place during an Indiana Jones movies.  He used a toy car, an Indiana Jones figure and then a "bad guy" figure.  The gist of the scene is that the "bad guy" is in the car and Indiana Jones throws him out and takes over the car.

I called this student's mother to run the idea by her and I could tell in her voice that the idea of her child taking on a mentoring role would mean a lot to this student.  He hasn't had much of a chance to come forward as a leader and this would be a wonderful opportunity to highlight one of his strengths.  When I pulled him out of class and asked him if he would be willing to share his videos with the group and help us guide them through the process of creating videos of their own you could actually see the excitement start radiating from him.  I feel like we have given this student a chance to shine in a leadership role that might not have occurred without this group being formed.  

Here's to hoping tomorrow's first gathering of Scotty Dog Productions goes well!

Stop Motion Video Club (Slice of Life Day Twenty-Seven)

After hearing about, reading about and thinking about stop motion videos this year my friend Tony over at Learn Me Sumthin' and I are plunging into this world with a group of 3rd and 4th graders.  We decided to start small this year focusing on two grade levels and then next year possibly branch into more grade levels.  The group will meet once a week for 5 weeks for an hour after school.  We sent out the forms this past week and I was not quite sure what the response would be.

The response was awesome!  We have 38 students who brought back forms expressing interest in joining the "club".   So now we have to start laying some foundations for this to get off the ground successfully.  We are crafting an agreement for the students to sign laying out the expectations for group members.  Anyone have ideas of what we could include?

A big thank you to Kevin at Kevin's Meandering Mind for inspiring this journey!

Digital Storytelling with Kindergarten friends

Earlier in the year I created a post about Kindergarten students learning how to use Pixie through allowing them time to explore and play. Taking that time paid off BIG time recently when I had the chance to work with them again using Pixie to create stories.

As we all know little Kindergarten friends don't quite have the handwriting capabilities yet to write out stories. But...boy, do they have some stories to share! I heard stories about everything from pizza to Indiana Jones to playing tag with friends.

These little friends are just starting to learn about the craft of storytelling. The first session we worked together students were creating a drawing and then their story was something like “This is a picture of a cave.” The teacher and I chatted later that day and we discussed the importance of starting to talk to them about basic elements of a story: characters, setting, beginning, middle and ending. The second session we focused on having a quick class discussion to remind everyone of the elements and then made sure to have each student practice telling their story before recording it. At times it was helpful to guide students storytelling with some simple leading questions like:

Who was there?
Where were you?
What happened next?


Now, these stories are still on the basic level, but we could tell they got the idea of the difference between telling about the picture and telling a small story.

Here are a few examples to listen to and enjoy!


Snowman by Sarah from Mary Brothers on Vimeo.






New Clothes from Mary Brothers on Vimeo.