St. Elmo's Third Graders have done it!

Kade and Xavier, two of St. Elmo's brightest have created their very own book trailer!

Initially, we viewed a book trailer about the book, The Mitten. Then, I talked to them about our purpose for reading and said, "We are going to make our own book trailer for The Christmas Wreath." I asked them to watch the The Mitten book trailer again, and tell me what makes the audience want to read the story.

Xavier said:
1.) It has a problem.
2.) It is a glimpse of the story.
3.) It makes you wonder.
4.) It has a picture on the cover.

Kade said:
1.) It has good music.
2.) The words stay up there long enough for you to read it.
3.) It is made of still pictures.
4.) It gives credit to the author.

Finally, we prepared for the making of our own book trailer by reading, The Christmas Wreath, but before we started, I asked them to think about these three things as we read:

1.) summary of the story
2.) think of something that might make others want to read it
3.) think of a question to ask your audience

Kade took notes mostly composed of predictions in the form of questions as we read the story, and Xavier did a lot of summarizing (Xavier also answered many of Kade's questions).

As we read the story and looked over their notes, one of the boys established that it was a mystery story. So, "It's a mystery," became the theme of our book trailer. Once we established our theme, we had to decide which direction to go. Xavier suggested our hook should be, "Who made the wreath?" and Kade eventually revised his idea to read, "Can you solve the mystery?" Once they came up with their hook about who, we decided make a web of the characters to help us organize our descriptions of each character. Their list was composed of the elves, the chief elf, the polar bear, and Santa. After we spent a few minutes attaching adjectives to each of the characters, we looked over our descriptions and replaced our initial adjectives with WOW words.

Finally, we wrote our outline for the plot. Each number represented a slide in the trailer starting with number one, "It's a mystery involving...". We followed suit with slides describing each character and wrapped it up with, "Can you help Santa discover the mystery behind the Christmas wreath miracle?"

Front beginning to finish, this process took about 105 minutes. After we read the story aloud together, I transcribed what they dictated, and they were responsible for everything else in the process including drag and drop, cropping, text insertion, taking the pictures of the pages with the iPad, and choosing the music. I posted it to the web, haven't stopped hearing about doing another one since. Student book trailer number one: SUCCESS!

The Mitten Book Trailer

Be sure to check back for a book trailer previewing Welcome Comfort made by one of our very own Explorers! Also, don't forget Reading Night is December 7, 2011! I hear it's going to be a Winter Wonderland worth remembering!