Monday, October 23, 2006

How did we go?

The key to making this lesson work has been finding something that the kids can relate to. About 3/4's of the kids loved the Punk Rocker song and some turned their nose up but that was fine. It still worked as a way to get conversation happening.
I ended up using three different videos that I downloaded from YouTube- all related to the Free Hugs phenomonem. One was the original video by the Sick Puppies, one was a video created by a student in America and the third one was of a young girl in Canada who talked to the camera about the effect the video had on her and what she then did. It was a lovely reflective piece that summed up the power of the connections that can be made across the world.
I used a cool piece of freeware FLV to download each of the videos onto my laptop so that I could use them off line and also because we block Youtube here at school.
The lesson has actually blown out to three lessons because there was so much discussion and the kids wanted to hear the song and see the video a few more times.
Today we did our group thing, took the kids outside in the beautiful sunshine. They worked in groups of three and compared and contrasted the way each media-video and audio got it's message across.
Then after even more discussion and sharing we are almost ready to individually blog. It has certainly taken alot longer than I thought but the results have been really positive and have encouraged me to continue to use what is available to stimulate and encourage.