How to address violence in the news with your students.
Creating movies about themselves to show their classmates could make an excellent beginning-of-year project for kids. Alternatively, teachers could have a "student of the week" who creates a movie to show the class. Older kids or students needing more of a challenge could create a Curious About Me movie about a character from a piece of literature.
Continue readingCurious About Me features kids' favorite monkey in stories they help create. To make a movie, kids choose from two story options: "Curious About Me with Curious George" or "A Day at the Zoo with Curious George." They then follow verbal instructions to take photos of themselves, their family, friends, and pets; record audio and video; and/or create their own art. The movie seamlessly incorporates kids' contributions into the stories, which are automatically saved in-app and can be opened to make changes or saved to the camera roll. The Man in the Yellow Hat narrates, letting kids know that "George is so curious to find out all about you."
Curious About Me lets kids create stories with a beloved character about the person they know best -- themselves! Multiple kids can create movies, and several movies can be saved in-app, so it works wonderfully in a one- or few-iPad classroom. Alhough only two story theme options are provided, kids can change their responses to the prompts to change the stories. Verbal instructions are easy to follow, so emerging readers can set out to snap pictures, shoot video, color, and more with minimal adult intervention (athough they may need help locating where they live on the map). Movies play impressively well, with kids' contributions fitting in seamlessly, although they do take up quite a bit of storage space on a device, especially as more kids add movies. Kids personalize it all -- taking pictures of their family and home -- and as the Man with the Yellow Hat interjects, "every family is different." It'd be nice to have a few more story themes, but what's included will delight kids as they produce movies they'll be proud to share.