InstaDigest 12/9-12/20

What does ANYONE really do before winter break anyway?

Happy Holidays, my friends! I am so happy to be at this resting place in a year that, for me at least, has flown so fast I can hardly get my arms around it.

These last two weeks before break found me finishing up my Character Analysis 101 unit with seventh graders and partnering with our civics teachers to help students create mini-documentaries for the 2024-2025 C-SPAN StudentCam competition.

While I always have considered multimedia content creation to be composition, I’ve really been strunk this week by how much students are transferring their writing composition skills into video to successfully create a documentary. For instance, yesterday, a student said, “Oh well, I didn’t include my two main examples in the introductory clips, but I probably should, right? Because I’m going to come back to them later in the documentary…” And I thought Eureka! She’s got it!

The projects are challenging and super-cool — perhaps I’ll return to how-to-have-kids-make-documentaries as a unit plan down the road?

Alright, here it is, folks, the last InstaDigest of 2024. Here’s what we did and what it looked like: