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12 Days Before Christmas Break (BONUS ACTIVITY) - Holiday Emoji Book Trailers w/ Flipgrid



Sorry for the overload of holiday ideas. We have one more week of school here in South Carolina (which involved a hurricane makeup day) and teachers are looking for creative ways to keep students engaged.

This idea of making emoji book trailers came from working with staff at Whale Branch Elementary School. Their Literacy Coach wanted to have every teacher in the school record a book trailer. The idea was to share one a week (Friday) on the morning news but she needed help planning and recording staff. 

We met up to record our sample trailers and to discus the project and potential pitfalls. Initially I think we were both thinking of recording the teachers using the green screen but for a school wide project that would have been a lot of work. I was also thinking of the teachers who would refuse because they ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY don't want to be recorded.  That is when Flipgrid popped back on my radar. It fell off my radar last year when Microsoft took it over (mainly because there were so many changes that I simply didn't keep up with it). 

My thought was that Flipgrid will allow teachers to record independently (so no need to drag out my recording equipment and schedule appointments) and I knew that you could download the finished videos so getting them on the news show would be easy. 

Ms. Bates and I settled into make our recordings when I noticed that Flipgrid added an emoji feature (remember I hadn't kept up with changes for an entire year). As soon as I saw the emojis it made me think of those camera shy teachers and I changed our sample trailer scripts into ones that we could use emojis with. We had so much fun creating them that I thought students would too. Here are links to my "Best Christmas Pageant Ever" trailer and Mrs. Bates "The Relatives Came" book trailer.



I tried it out with a group of fourth graders and they enjoyed the activity but they never got a chance to make their own. As a group we created one for "Bear Stays Up for Christmas" (click the title to see one of the completed videos). We ended up with a synopsis of the book versus a trailer. They all recorded the same video (my plan is to go back and see how they would do on their own). 

If you do this activity I would suggest two ELA blocks (those are typically longer blocks of time). On the first day I would show them a sample (ask them what they notice), go over the available emojis to discuss meaning, read a book, work out a script and pick emojis whole group. Have them record it (which will give them practice with the tools and recording). I gave students the Flipgrid link and copied the script into Google Classroom so they would have what they needed for the activity. Flipgrid has a great notes feature where they could paste the script so they could read from it (sort of like an on screen teleprompter that doesn't scroll). 


On the second day the students would pick a holiday picture book (or any book really) read it and create an emoji script. Once the script was approved by the teacher they could record. 

One thing I should have stressed to students is the need to hold still while recording with the emoji over their face. One child complained that their emoji kept moving when in fact he was the one doing all the moving. 🤣

If you try it with students I would love to see their videos. Feel free to link anything in the comments or tag me on Twitter @atechcoachlife



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