Anti-Smoking Commercial

Prior to this project, eighth grade health students learned about the negative effects of tobacco. On the first day of the unit, students completed a circle map (Thinking Map) to activate their prior knowledge and a tree map (Thinking Map) to organize tobacco health statistics shared by their teacher. Next, a guest speaker, a teacher at our school and former smoker, shares her story with the class on how smoking affected her life, including her mother dying of lung cancer. Finally, students learned about the financial effects of smoking. For example, if you smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for twenty-five years, it would cost you almost $41,000. Instead, you could have purchased a new Mercedes Benz!

For the project, groups of three to five students were challenged to create a 30 second to one minute long commercial choosing one main idea of why others shouldn't use tobacco. Following rubric guidelines provided by the teacher, students had two days to plan their commercial using a Thinking Map to organize their ideas and write out a script. On the third day, students filmed their commercials using a Flip camera. Then, the group spent the next two days editing their project. On the last day, students viewed all of the commercials created by the class evaluating them on creativity, premise, facts, production quality and length.