Book Trailers (updated)

Third grade students have been working on book trailers.  When I introduced Battle of the Books (post here) I showed some book trailers and they really enjoyed them so I thought, let's create some.

Each student had freedom to choose any book that was at their reading level.  They wrote a little bit about the book first.

(click the image to download the guide)

Then used Photopin (http://photopin.com/) to find pictures to show what they are going to discuss. Photopin is a great site for finding photos. Photopin uses Flickr to search Creative Commons photos so I know we can use all the photos the students find.  I had the "Let's be mature" conversation with the students in the beginning but we had NO incidents. If they couldn't find what they were looking for, they could use other sites I had collected: http://edu.symbaloo.com/mix/picsforprojects.

After I had students edit at least one to to fit into their project.  Many students add character names but other got really creative.  We used the site BeFunky, http://www.befunky.com/ . The website allows you to do basic editing, exposure, brightness, resizing, etc, but it also had fun filters, borders, and allows you to add cool text features.  There is an undo and redo button which is convenient for these elementary age students.

Before and  after


Students then took all their photos and put them in iMovie.  We added a title sequence, sound effects OR a song, and transitions.  They turned out awesome.

Here are 4 examples: