I have been playing back some of the filming Emily did for our Literature Circles movie this year and am delighted to find some treasures there. Emily did the editing, but I will have to get her to re-upload her version because the entire folder of class work which we had up on Public Share was deleted by a member of the class who had nothing better to do and no doubt thought it funny(Fortunately, the students had saved their files to their home drives, but the movie had taken forever to load). And yes, I have worked out who the culprit was and have made sure they can't do it again.
Meanwhile, I'm looking through my own folder of group discussions which I downloaded from the camera to give to Emily in the first place. And she has done a great job of interviewing her classmates, encouraging even two shy girls to talk about what they were working on with the novel A Ghost In My Suitcase by Gabrielle Wang. The group discussing Burn Bright(Marianne De Pierres) did a proper Lit Circles discussion, explained what their roles were and generally gave a good example of what it should be. Emily hardly had to do anything there!
I interviewed some other students because it was getting late in the piece and we really needed to get everything on film. The interview with the group studying Justin D'Ath's Pool was very productive, even though it was not a discussion as such.
Poor Cuong was the only member of his group left on the day I did the interviews, but he did well explaining about Dragonkeeper (Carole Wilkinson).
The girls who were doing Mao's Last Dancer had worked well together, reading it aloud when they could, for the benefit of those whose reading wasn't quite as good as the others, and discussing it seriously. They loved the book and came up with good responses. I interviewed them, though, because one of them had been absent a lot and missed a large chunk. And they responded well to the interview.
We had to film the Darren Shan interview after all the others, on my iPad, from which I emailed it in bits! The boys spoke quite well, though they had been better when we weren't filming.
I think there will be two versions, though. I still need to get Emily's version loaded - she was waiting for the creative responses, but I might have to add those, and we only have one proper book trailer because a couple were done on Powerpoint and one was done without sound.
Still, there will be some good stuff to show next time and I'm helping a colleague with his own Literature Circles.
And looking at the list, there are three by Australian writers and one published here, by a writer who is now living in Australia, as artistic director of the Queensland Ballet. There are some wonderful YA writers in Australia and it's great to see their work being enjoyed by my students.
Meanwhile, I'm looking through my own folder of group discussions which I downloaded from the camera to give to Emily in the first place. And she has done a great job of interviewing her classmates, encouraging even two shy girls to talk about what they were working on with the novel A Ghost In My Suitcase by Gabrielle Wang. The group discussing Burn Bright(Marianne De Pierres) did a proper Lit Circles discussion, explained what their roles were and generally gave a good example of what it should be. Emily hardly had to do anything there!
I interviewed some other students because it was getting late in the piece and we really needed to get everything on film. The interview with the group studying Justin D'Ath's Pool was very productive, even though it was not a discussion as such.
Poor Cuong was the only member of his group left on the day I did the interviews, but he did well explaining about Dragonkeeper (Carole Wilkinson).
The girls who were doing Mao's Last Dancer had worked well together, reading it aloud when they could, for the benefit of those whose reading wasn't quite as good as the others, and discussing it seriously. They loved the book and came up with good responses. I interviewed them, though, because one of them had been absent a lot and missed a large chunk. And they responded well to the interview.
We had to film the Darren Shan interview after all the others, on my iPad, from which I emailed it in bits! The boys spoke quite well, though they had been better when we weren't filming.
I think there will be two versions, though. I still need to get Emily's version loaded - she was waiting for the creative responses, but I might have to add those, and we only have one proper book trailer because a couple were done on Powerpoint and one was done without sound.
Still, there will be some good stuff to show next time and I'm helping a colleague with his own Literature Circles.
And looking at the list, there are three by Australian writers and one published here, by a writer who is now living in Australia, as artistic director of the Queensland Ballet. There are some wonderful YA writers in Australia and it's great to see their work being enjoyed by my students.
No comments:
Post a Comment