-A Day in the Life of a Kindergartener: We do this the first week of school. I take pictures of the students all day long and we create a story of our daily schedule. The students enjoy it and we watch it daily so they remember and get excited about what we do every day. I also show it at Back to School Night so that parents get a good idea of what their child is up to each day! They love it, too!
-Shape Hunt: When we study shapes, I take the students on a shape hunt around the school and we take pictures of all the different shapes we see in and out of the building. Then we put it together to create a story that tells all the shapes we see in our world around us.
-What Made This Shadow: When learning about shadows, students pick objects that create cool shadows and we place them outside on the black top on a sunny day. We take a picture of the shadow and a picture of the item with it's shadow. When the story is finished it first shows a picture of a shadow and you hear the student's asking "what made this shadow?" and there is time to try to guess/figure out what it could be. The next part shows the whole picture of the object. This is one of my favorite digital stories to make. My students love it every year!
-Famous Americans: Students learn about all the famous Americans and at the end of our unit, they all draw a name out of a hat of a person we've studied. They have to write a fact about that person and then we make costumes. The students read their fact to the class as they dress like the person they chose. I take pictures and they students record their fact so in the end we have a digital book about all of the famous Americans we learned about.
I am always looking for new ways to incorporate digital videos into my curriculum since I already know how much my students enjoy it. I enjoy it as well! Even though this isn't really new to me, I have learned a lot about some of the techniques and tools involved in digital video editing that I wasn't using before. I hope that as we continue working with these programs, my knowledge will grow and I will have a library full of more ideas that I can incorporate into my classroom!:)
The ideas you have already are pretty fantastic. When we talk about self-reflection, which I think is such a great thing, it made me think of something you might be able to use video for. When you have Back to School Night or something like that, you could show videos of the kids talking about some of the important things they've learned in your class. Then parents will know when they ask their kids, "What'd you do in school today?" and they say, "Nothing," that they really have learned some important stuff!
ReplyDeleteI can see how digital video could really speak to the youngest students who still developing their literacy skills in written media. Awesome idea to use digital videos with your students to achieve the same end. I think that Laura's idea is a great one. Also the words of students themselves are more likely to resonate with parents than a teacher's voice on Back to School night (sad but true). Maybe you could create a video with your present kindergarteners that could be used for next fall's Back to School night as well as a 'souvenir' for kids now to take with them from their year spent learning with you. Sounds like fun! Hope you can share the final video with all of us before the ITS program ends. Good luck!
ReplyDeleteThose are some great ideas to use in my Kindergarten class. Its amazing on how easy it is to use the video with them, once they understand how to do everything. Lots of work up front but worth it in the end. Overall, we have done a color walk, When I Grow Up (we use this at the end of the year kindergarten program, many parents cry seeing their little one), we are also piloting the new science curriculum so we have done videos on the weather, ants, plant cycle, and magnets.
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