I realized that in my urgency to get this project going, I never posted my own ideas about why I wanted my students to experience this project.

In addition to teaching

• research skills
  • note-taking,
  • summarizing,
  • paraphrasing,
  • picking out important details,
  • finding meaningful passages to quote,
  • citing sources)
• technological skills
  • blogs
  • RSS feeds
  • Google Reader
  • video/sound recording
  • video/sound editing
• writing skills
  • blogs (posts and responses)
  • query letters
  • thank you letters
  • findings essay
• interview skills
  • formulating open questions
  • finding contacts
  • asking follow-up questions
  • pacing of interview

what I am trying to do is show them the correlation between film-making and writing–how the raw film footage is like a rough draft or a free write and now we need to go in and revise and edit (pulling quotations, organizing in a meaningful way. I’m hoping for some carry-over into their writing–transference, that ever-elusive ideal. They seem to understand the purpose of the visual metaphor–maybe they’ll be able to think of a written one to make their prose richer.

Dear Parents,

I hope that you have heard by now that our class is creating a documentary film as a part of our research project.

For our film we will be interviewing “people on the street” to get information everyday people’s perceptions of climate change and global warming. In order to interview people other than teachers and students, we will be taking a walk (with our cameras and microphones) up to a corner near school where there are stores and gas stations. We think we will be able to get a more diverse interview pool that way.

Students will be interviewing in groups of four or five and there will be two adult supervisors. I can’t tell the exact day because that will depend on the weather, but I wanted you to be aware of our class plans.  If you need to contact your child, call the office and they will call me on my cell.