Hampton History Hunters

I was very concerned that students at my school had no idea of the history right under their feet. This lesson incorporated research skills (internet/books/visiting places), note taking (writing important relevant information), writing skills (script) and presentation (acting and delivering information). The students were those from my after-school Technology Club.

Part I-
>Student were presented with project to create a video showing areas in Hampton, VA that had to do with the Civil War.
>Together, students did internet and book research to find what areas of Hampton had to do with events in the Civil War

Part 2-
>Each student chose one place that they wanted to do further research on and present on the video

Part 3-
>Individually, students did research on the internet and in books on their particular place.
>Students took relevant notes on their research (this is a skill that my students needed a lot of work on. They just wanted to print numerous pages of what they found instead of skim for important information and take notes on those things)

Part 4-
>We loaded in my car and actually visited the places. Each place had additional information located there.
>Along with the places they chose, we visited the ,"Hampton History Museum" and "Fort Monroe" which had a lot of pertinent information they could use on their chosen location
>Students also took still shots while were were there to use later on in the final video

Part 5-
>Student took ALL of the information and condensed it into a script that they would use when video taping at their location (proper grammar/ spelling/ etc. was expected in their writing of the script)

Part 6-
>Practice video taping at school. This was very important because students had to learn how to slow down, speak clearly, speak fluently, and speak loudly. (This was actually the hardest part of the lesson)

Part 7-
>Go back to the places and do the actual video taping. We did use "Que Cards" during the taping so that students did not have to memorize their script.

Part 8-
>Take the various tapes created by each student and, using IMovie, put the video tape together adding still shots, introduction, and final credits.

**Our final tape was show to our school, each student received a copy of the video and our tape was submitted to the "Virginia Trekkers" web site contest and won First Place!!