Giving Children Super Powers!

I had a fantastic day in Year 4 doing some impressive writing and then bringing it to life in the form of amazing digital stories!

Our writing today was based on the music video - Titanium by David Guetta -


This was a video I added to the Music Video Shed on the Literacy Shed a while back. It is a great video to help children answer simple inference and deduction questions. You can find all my ideas for using this video here.

After discussing the video, we looked at possible causes for the initial incident in the school. Many thought that he may have been provoked, bullied or picked on. This led to a discussion about keeping feelings to yourself and how it can lead to an reaction that maybe prevented by talking to someone. 

We used this as a stimulus for some writing! I am a massive fan of Alan Peat and Mat Sullivan's exciting sentences. And the book '50+ iPad ideas for Exciting Sentences,' written by both Alan and I demonstrate ways in which to use the technology to develop children's understanding of the different sentence types. A great way to help structure texts is using the Slow Writing resource from @LearningSpy and @David_Triptico. We adapt it slightly to include some of the exciting sentences. These were our sentence tools today -

Sentence 1 - If, if, if, then
Sentence 2 - 3_ed
Sentence 3 - 2A
Sentence 4 - Where opener
Sentence 5 - Adverb opener
Sentence 6 - Short sentence
Sentence 7 - Tell: show 3 examples;
Sentence 8 - Short sentences

As always I needed a hook to get children willing to write and write with purpose and quality. To do this, I gave them super powers in the form of an Augmented Reality app called - AR effects. This allowed us to take pictures of the children with lightning, balls of fire and tornados out of their hands! 


The writing the children produced was fantastic, so engaged, using the rules brilliantly and adding their own stamp on each one - 








But we couldn't just leave the writing lifeless on the page, especially when we had such an amazing picture showing our super powers! In the afternoon, we transformed our writing into films using iMovie. The children recorded images and videos to demonstrate different emotions and feelings. They added different sound effects and many composed their own theme music in Garageband. Have a watch of their incredible work! Listen out to how creative some have been with the sound and changed the music to fit the atmosphere of the story! 


If you would love to know more about how technology can be used purposefully to raise standards in the classroom, Mr P can provide CPD and inset - nationwide and beyond! Just email - davyhulme.ipad@gmail.com or visit here.

Comments

  1. Unknown5 February 2015 at 10:24

    This sounds great! I have downloaded the AR effects app - but how do I make the child's image the target image? Hartley

    ReplyDelete

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