4th Grade Film Festival Part 3

The third genre of advertising we studied and wrote in is "Bandwagon." Although to be fair, it's really not possible to write a bandwagon commercial without crossing over into other genres. This first commercial could just as easily be "Adventure," and is probably the truest commercial that was made this year. It does a couple of things that have never been done before. The first is that there is no talking in the commercial. There is only a voice-over. The second is that instead of a group of friends celebrating a product, as in most bandwagon commercials written by elementary students, it shows off the genre by having a series of completely unrelated people all over the world, tied together by the child's product.

4th Grade Film Festival Part 2

The second genre of advertising that the children studied we eventually labeled as "You'll Be Better." This is the type of advertising that promises a better life if only you buy their product. This genre produced one of the most sold commercials I've seen come out of 4th grade. I like this one because it's good without any special effects. It's quick and to the point:

Battle of the Books!

This year I wanted to try to inspire kids to choose "just-right" books while they were doing independent reading. Battle of the Books is something that I wanted to do for a long time, but have never been around enough books to do it properly. I'm still not, but instead of having a book for each child, I put out 26 books with 5 or 6 copies each. Then I split the class into 6 groups. Each member of the group worked with each other to maximize the number of books they read, and at the end of 2 1/2 weeks we all came together in the library to do our battle.

The prize? An increased grant for their startup businesses in class economy.

4th Grade Film Festival Part 1

I haven't posted in a while (besides the International Poetry Day post) in part because I've been really busy with our advertising unit. This year we have 26 students who each made a commercial in a particular genre for their class business. It was a big task. But when it was over, our class had a really cool film festival for the elementary titled "26 short films that want to sell you something." For the next few blog posts I'm going to feature a few of these short films based on their genres.

Before we started writing, we studied and discovered several advertising genres. Here are some of the genres that were found this year:

Adventure, Bandwagon, Celebrity, "You'll Be Better", Fear and Safety, and Comedy

The next challenge was for the children to write a commercial for their product in a particular genre. Then they wrote a commercial for the same product in another genre. And then another.

After that they chose one to polish and include as many details as possible.

Some commercials required a green screen, and some did not. For this blog post, I want to highlight the "Adventure" genre of advertising. We see this genre a lot when companies sell toys. But there's a surprising amount of ads that sell socks that use this genre too. Socks by themselves are quite boring. But socks worn by a mountain climber on the top of Mount Everest are awesome!

Kids love writing in this genre. Here are three diverse student examples from this genre. The first imploys the green screen in a variety of ways.

International Poetry Day

Wednesday, March 21^st was International Poetry Day. To celebrate, the 4^th grade had an evening Shel Silverstein Poetry Jam. I scoured “Light In The Attic”, “Where The Sidewalk Ends”, and “Falling Up” for the 40 longest poems, then had each of the 26 children choose from those poems.