Friday, May 21, 2010

Book Trailers

For our culminating projects of Literature Circles, the boys have created book trailers to promote their book. I first heard about this idea from our tech coach and on the English Companion Ning. When I first started researching book trailers, I found a great website called Digital Booktalk that was started by research students at the University of Central Florida. I showed my students the examples of student contributed work on the site and told them we would be submitting our book trailers to this site. (Immediately their interest was piqued!)

We began the process by having our tech coach, Melissa Smith, come into our room to teach the boys about iMovie. They then used storyboards to plan their movies, keeping in mind the requirements for their movie (they needed to include the book's main characters, theme, conflict, and setting). They used Flip cameras and a "green screen" (actually a green sheet) to film reenactments of important scenes from their books. I had no idea how much fun they (and I) would have with this. I was excited to see all the props and costumes they were bringing in-- they were even getting their groups together to film scenes at their houses over the weekend!

I also met with the instrumental music teacher to see if he could use some of his class time to teach the boys about creating their own music in Garageband. They spent two class periods with him composing music that mirrored their story's plot. We spent most of this past week editing, and the final products are pretty impressive. One example is below on the book The Liberation of Gabriel King. I will definitely do this project again-- I think using book trailers fosters a love of reading and encourages deeper understanding of the texts. This kind of project reminds me that learning CAN be engaging and exciting.


Book Trailers from Courtney Humphreys on Vimeo.

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