Skip to main content

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



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Weathering, Erosion, and Deposition Activity

I saw this activity at a science conference years ago and haven't had a chance to use it in a classroom until this week (mainly because I didn't teach weathering, erosion, and deposition). It is a great way to reinforce the definition of the weathering, erosion, and deposition in a highly kinesthetic manner. Basically you break the students up into groups of three. One group is "Weathering" another group is "Erosion" and the third group is "Deposition". Add tape to the back because you are going to stick them to the forehead of the children in each group. The "weathering" students get a sheet of paper that is their "rock" they will be breaking down. At the start of the activity the "weathering" students will start ripping tiny pieces of their "rock" and handing it to the "erosion" students. The "erosion" students will be running their tiny piece of "rock&

Picture of the Day - Activity

I attended a training class and a science coach shared an activity that he does with his students to help them differentiate between observations, inferences, and predictions. He puts a picture on the interactive white board as a warm up (he gets the pictures from a variety of sources but uses National Geographic's Picture of the Day a lot). The picture above is from the National Geographic site. He has the students make five observations. Then he makes the students make five inferences. Finally he has the students make five predictions. He does this every day and it really drives home the difference between those three key inquiry vocabulary terms. I've done this activity with both my sixth and fourth grade science classes and the students really got into it and became proficient at telling me the difference between those terms.

Rock Cycle Activity

Today I got to spend the day with a 3rd grade science teacher doing a rock cycle activity. She had asked for help a couple of weekends ago to find some engaging rock cycle activities for her students. I quickly did a Pinterest search and came up with a link to a middle school blog where they featured a fun looking rock cycle station activity. That website took me to the originating activity site - Illinois State Museum Geology Online and their Ride the Rock Cycle activity . I read through it and felt it was doable for third graders (although I was a little nervous about the cartooning). I offered my help and we put together the activity. The kids did it WONDERFULLY. It was one of those lesson you wish was observed (but of course never is :) They are on an alternating science schedule so she only had two of the four classes today but it was a good sampling of children. She had one class that had a high portion of struggling learners and the second class had a high