Blabberize

                                                

Objective:

In this lesson, the students were given the opportunity to be imaginative and expressive through the writing of a monologue or dialogue for a book they were reading or have recently read. The objective is to promote a book they are reading using Blabberize, a program that allows people to animate photos and add audio to bring them to life. This project was used to assess their understanding of the book being read, as well as a way to promote the book.

Directions:-

Using an image of the main character from the book or the author, you will create: 1) a brief video ‘diary’ about how the character feels about an event or events from the story (no spoilers), or 2) a video from the point of view of the author thinking as he/she wrote the book.

Rubric

Here are some examples:-

Rin and Miyu

Woon Ji

Lascaux Cave Art

Lascaux is famous for its Paleolithic cave paintings which is estimated to be about 20,000 years old found in South Eastern France. he caves were discovered by  teenagers who stumbled upon the ruins.
The paintings are mainly pictures of animals and symbols, and possibly one human figure.
The students were invloved in this hands on project where they did cave art after taking a virtual tour around the caves.
As they did the tour, they noted down the characteristics of the caves and used them to create their piece of art work. They worked in partners and used butcher paper with color pastels (keeing in mind the only colors used during that time period were red, black, orange, and brown).
This project was targeted for all learners and they enjoyed working on it.

Memoirs


This year students wrote memoirs as their personal narrative for our first writing unit in language arts. We spent a considerable amount of time on mini-lessons that addressed the following:
*generating story ideas
*characteristics of memoirs
*hooking the reader
*focusing on the main event
*showing not telling using the senses
*good endings
*revision and editing skills



As a final assessment, they were asked to self-assess using the following rubric. The rubric begins with a grade 4 level to the left and works towards a grade 7 level of writing proficiency. This rubric was adapted from materials from TCRWP (Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project). The original rubric is about 4 pages long; however, we knew that this would overwhelm our student population in which many of them are ELL's. So, we adapted this rubric to make it more manageable.

Here are some examples of memoir writing from the beginner EAL students.