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:

Summer Time

This summer I thought I would really get my blog off the ground. My plan was to post more, join linky parties, and get more followers but it's already the end of July and that has not happened. The reasoning is a good one.

This summer I am working at a creative arts camp.  Over three periods I teach, Comic Book Creation, Digital Art, and Movie Making a.k.a. Lights, Camera, Action! My students are amazingly creative, kind, intelligent, and genuinely fun to work with.  They have taken up much more of my summer that could have ever suspected. Below is a brief description and examples.  A lot of work contains my students' faces and could not be posted but below are some examples and more can be found here: https://sites.google.com/site/kpssummer13/

First is Comic Book Creation.  We use Comic Life to create a final product but the steps to get there are tons of fun.  Students develop a story and either find images, take images with a camera, or draw images to add their comics.  Many of my students are use very basic Photoshop skills to put their stories together.  Some of my students created well developed stories while others were quite silly and everything in between.  Find examples below and at my camp site.

In Digital Art students learned Photoshop skills and some basic photography.  Some weeks were different than others but we always focused on selecting using the Quick Selection Tool, or Color Selection, manipulating layers, filters, text/paragraph, and the blur and smudge tool.  One week we focused on artists and recreated the works of Andy Warhol, René Magritte, Roy Lichtenstein, and Salvador Dali.

Last, during Lights, Camera, Action! the students create movies using either live action, stopmotion, or claymation.  Surprisingly in this class most students wanted to work alone. The movies were FUN and students helped each other out with voices. Check out my kids movies: https://sites.google.com/site/kpssummer13/lightscameraaction