Everything you see and hear in this video was done by 6th grade students. They made the puppets, drew the backgrounds, wrote the scripts, performed, and operated the camera.
Really, my main involvement was telling them where the “Record” button was.
No, not that kind of framing! I’m talking about when you have parts of the picture parallel with the edges of the picture to create a “frame” in the image itself, rather than putting a frame around the picture after it’s printed. A good frame should be on at least two sides of the image, but more works, as well!
This lesson was also on looking at things from a vantage point that most people don’t use. My students were encouraged to take pictures doing anything other than standing and holding the camera directly in front of them.
As always, this led to some interesting results.
My apologies for being a bit behind schedule with uploading student photos. The following are from our lesson on cropping / getting closer to / zooming in on the focal point in order to improve the composition, as well as using linear elements (lines) as focal points themselves.
I know I should be used to it by now, but I’m still taken aback by some of these shots. These kids do good work. 
The meeting for February 4th, 2008 has been canceled due to a family emergency. I’ve adjusted the schedule accordingly.
Sorry about this.
And before I forget, we do have a schedule that’s much easier for me to update. If you have a Mac OS computer you can even subscribe to it via iCal! Just click on the calendar icon in the sidebar to see when the next meeting is.
This assignment was a follow-up of the last one in that it still required students to find a good focal point. This time, however, they were also told to find a way to avoid “camera shake” (The blurriness you get when the camera moves while taking the picture) without using a tripod.
I hope everyone has had a safe and productive winter break. There will be several updates soon, but first I will be fixing some things on the site that have been bothering me for a while. Most of the changes won’t be noticeable to the casual visitor, but they’ll make my ability to update much more streamlined.
This will include an automatically updated calendar so students will know which days they should stay after school.
In fact, that’s my top priority for this site.
Our first art club lesson was abbreviated due to the usual things that need to be covered in the first meeting, but we still managed to select pseudonyms for ourselves and take pictures that each had one good focal point. (Focal points are the things that stand out more than anything else in a picture.)
Here’s most of the photos. Click on a thumbnail to see a larger version.
Here’s a video where 6th graders are presenting their alternate energy engines. There are two choices on the menu – either check out the short video that has my favorite projects, or supersize it and see all the engines they made.
My 5th graders made paper maché volcanoes, so we decided to try and do something fun with them. I think a traditional baking soda / vinegar combination might have been more visually spectacular, but Mentos and Diet Coke is just plain cool.
