Check out this amazing/hilarious video made by teacher Mr. Arturo Avina’s kindergarten class from LAUSD’s Olympic Primary Center. This is their adaptation of the children’s classic ‘Miss Nelson is Missing’
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Ditch the Teacher manuals and bring books to life!!
Ask students and teachers about their favorite children’s stories, and it’s almost guaranteed that “Miss Nelson is Missing” will be named. My students at Olympic Primary Center in Los Angeles and I recently took this classic story and adapted it for the small screen.
I have to admit that this film project stemmed from selfish reasons. It’s very difficult to step into a classroom everyday and do nothing but worksheets, drill-and-kill test prep, and teach from a manual. I need to do something fun and different. So, embarking on this project gave me something to look forward to. Luckily, it gave the kids something to look forward to as well. I may be slightly biased but the end product is pretty amazing.
What can other teachers do to make their own literary film projects come to life? Here are eight tips:
1. Be selfish: Throw away the teacher’s manual (gasp!) and pick a story YOU love. Give yourself something to look forward to everyday. You deserve it, and so do your kids. What’s that? Your district says you have to drill-and-kill? If your district told you to jump off a bridge would you do that too?
2. Make connections: Yes, now that you’ve thrown away the teacher’s manual you’ll have to justify it. Luckily, that’s easy to do with a film project. It’s reading comprehension, oral language skills, music, theater, and technology integration all rolled into one. Depending on your story, you can also create tie-ins to other academic subjects. Additionally, you’re teaching them real-world skills and problem solving. Not many worksheets can do all of that.
3. Write a script, and then toss it aside: Seriously. As the film evolves, the script becomes a suggestion. The movie is like a living creature. It will change and grow. Don’t fight it. Go with the flow. Kids are creative and they’ll start coming up with ideas. You’re creative too, so jump into the fun!
4. Find music you’re obsessed with! Sometimes a good pop song is better at telling a story than a typical nursery rhyme. I mean, do you really want to keep singing, “Mary Had a Little Lamb?” And do you think others want to keep hearing it? No and no. Go pop and everyone wins! When in doubt, pick Madonna.
5. Don’t waste time: Have five minutes to burn before lunch? Or did those overzealous kids finish their assignment faster than you thought, leaving you like a deer in headlights with nothing to keep them occupied? Don’t despair! Don’t waste a minute and use that time to rehearse lines.
6. Say goodbye to breaks: Be prepared to give up your recess, lunch, and a few hours of sleep (and perhaps lose 10 pounds in the process.) Hours and hours will be spent on planning, gathering props, setting up scenes, and editing. It’s a time-consuming process, but a rewarding one.
7. Make mistakes: And make plenty of them. Try different ideas no matter how ridiculous they may seem. This is very much a trial-and-error process, and that’s OK. It’s a great learning experience and the beauty of film is that you can re-film scenes, or fix things in the editing room. Sometimes mistakes can turn out to be gold (or they can at least make a heck of a blooper reel.) If you have a Mac, iMovie is your friend, and a good editing tool for beginners.
8. Have a purpose: Do you want to have a big movie premiere for the school? The parents? How will you acknowledge the students? Will this be entered in a contest? Will it be on YouTube for the world to love and cherish? Get the kids motivated and excited with an event that will acknowledge their hard work. Give them a purpose for their efforts, and with any luck, they’ll learn to tackle future endeavors with the same enthusiasm. Something like this may not be on a Scantron, but the lessons learned are priceless.
Since my class finished our film, the students have been brimming with pride in their accomplishment and have seen the film so many times that they can now recite each others’ lines. What started as a class project on school and community became an epic production that blended technology, music, and dramatic arts, and at the same time, developed reading comprehension, vocabulary, and oral language skills
The students learned to be creative and work collaboratively, and that is something that test-prep will never teach. I hope teachers, parents, and kids are entertained by our efforts and hopefully encouraged to blend more technology and dramatic arts into the curriculum. We hope you enjoy our movie as much as we enjoyed making it.
Above article from GOOD.is
Murals and Math: One School’s Solution to Graffiti
My work as a public artist is specific to the discovery and interpretation of connections between people and culture through interactive, participatory visual art. For the last four years, Green School math teacher Nathan Affield and I have teamed up to create murals that combine art and mathematics to empower students and connect them to their communities in Brooklyn, New York. These projects build lasting relationships and help students realize their strengths.
Our first project took place in the school with two mapping projects that are permanently installed in our school’s hallways. Based on the sustainability principles of the school, the students went out in their community to collect visual data on what was culturally, environmentally, and personally sustainable in their neighborhoods. They mapped out the neighborhoods using zoomed in abstractions, noting the collected data with symbols.
In 2011, Affield and I created a project where a math class surveyed the whole school on how they were feeling, what color that feeling represented, where that feeling fell on a scale between one and 10, and what time of day the data was recorded. The students then aggregated and color-coded the data to create a 150 histogram covering the back wall of the school. In a line graph organized by the time of day and negative space that color–codes the students’ grades, one gets a full day glimpse into the emotions of the students at any given point of the day. At first glance, the mural looks like an abstract, colorful cityscape. It is only when the mural is “read”, that the data can be understood.
In 2012, we brought the students outside the classroom and into the community where they teamed up with seniors from the local senior center to graph out weather patterns from 1930 to a projection of the future. In class, students had been studying mathematical modeling and how to use evidence to defend a claim. With daily high temperature data from NOAA, two-dimensional graphing techniques and their knowledge of central tendency, students collaborated to reposition their two-dimensional graphs into a single three-dimensional line graph modeling the past weather cycles that they used as evidence to base their climate change claims. They worked with seniors—some who remembered the historical weather patterns the students had graphed—and passerbys, creating lasting connections among each other and the community.
This year we will be visualizing the number Pi on another wall on Graham Avenue in East Williamsburg. The design involves replacing the infinite digits of Pi with color-coded blocks and viewing the irrational number as a shape. For the first time, students will see the negative space of Pi and search for patterns. To focus students on the concept of infinity, we chose to use the Fibonacci or Golden Spiral, representing another irrational number, Phi, as the framework for the visualization. As the space in the spiral gets smaller, the bars of the number shorten. When you first look at the image, you might see a shell pattern or a cityscape. Only upon investigation, will you know that it is a representation of Pi.
Mockup of Visualization of Pi
The act of painting murals is empowering. Once a student makes a mark on a wall, it becomes his or hers. When you walk down the busy street of Graham Ave, almost every wall is covered in random tags. We help the students create public art that means something and has significance. Students living in Brooklyn need this kind of connection to their communities because when the students invest in their communities, the communities invest in them. These murals are also made for the neighborhood. The results are not only beautiful images, but also sparked conversations.
The Kickstarter campaign we created has been a wild success, attaining its goal within 48 hours, which has more than doubled in four days. Money beyond the goal will be invested back into the community to create more public art in the neighborhood. Artist Ellie Balk will manage a grant and call for local artists to create another mural in the neighborhood. A scholarship program for students will also be set up. People still wanting to support this project should know that their investment will go directly to the enrichment of students and their community. Consider backing an educational and culturally enriching project.
Source: GOOD.is
