See How They Grow

OBJECTIVE:

The student will create an on-going digital presentation (scrapbook/journal) documenting events of the school year, reflecting on his personal growth in the areas of reading, writing and art.
The student will write captions for photographs.
The student will be recorded reading into a microphone from a book or a story he has written.
The student will take digital photographs.
The student will create original works of art.

STEPS:

Note: For convenience, each student will need a jump drive to save his individual work. This way each student's project is portable, so he can work from various locations.

On the first and last day of school, the teacher will photograph each student individually.

The student will use a kid-friendly program like Kidspiration to design a digital artwork featuring his name. The artwork should include the school year, student's grade level and teacher name. Then the artwork should be saved in a picture format on the student's jump drive. The artwork will be the opening slide (cover) of his digital scrapbook presentation.

With assistance the student will add the digital art name page and the photograph of himself on the first day of school in a program like Digital Storytelling/Photostory. The student can add a caption to his first day of school photograph stating that it's the first day of school and the date in this program. Additionally, the student can add music or sound affects. The project can be saved on the student's jump drive. The student can add photographs and video clips throughout the school year. For suggestions of additional material see below.

Last, the concluding photograph should be a picture of the student at the end of the school year. At this time the presentation can be saved as a movie file.

Suggestions for adding to the digital scrapbook content:

Throughout the year a student can add photographs of classroom activities he takes with a digital camera or Ipod Touch to his presentation. The student should add a brief caption describing the classroom event.

The teacher or another student will video the student reading a book at the beginning of the year and again at the end of the year. These video clips can be added to the digital presentation to reflect student growth in the area of reading.

A memory can be created of student artwork by photographing the artwork with a digital or document camera. Then importing the photographs into the Digital Storytelling project and adding a brief description of the art project.

Student writing and illustrations can be photographed. The student can then be recorded reading his own story or poetry in the presentation.

Video clips can be taken of a student during show-and-tell or other classroom activities.

"The sky is the limit," with this project. Let your students' imaginations go.