First Grade

I have the old Quasar VHR camera in my room. It only works plugged in, but the first graders love it. I use it to record their reader's theater so that they could hear and see themselves. Every group I have is intrigued by the camera, so I have incorporated a bit of movie making into the end of the year activities, but am thinking that it is so motivating that we should start the process earlier.

 I use hard copy story boards for the "shot" and the basic lines spoken, and then teach the camera experts how to zoom in and zoom out, start and stop recording, and how to operate the tripod.

The end of the year fifth grade group is gathering "Favorite Memory" stories for the promotion party this Friday. They will be dropping video clips into Movie Maker, and adding some music as background. We had one digital video camera that makes little Quick Time movies that had to be converted, so we used a You Tube converter program and changed them all to .avi so that the Movie Maker could see them.  If I had parental rights signed, I'd post it at the end, but I don't and I don't think I will get them before Friday.