Strategies
Three-Five-Three
Students are given three minutes to think about the prompt, five minutes to write, and three minutes to share out with their table or the whole class. I will use this strategy to guide the beginning of the activities below.
The Missing Adjectives
In order to help students understand the power of adjectives in describing place, this strategy takes a descriptive passage and removes the adjectives. Without the descriptive language, students read a relatively dry text that describes a place, but that largely fails to come to life in their imagination. They read the same passage with the adjectives and see the how the language helps create a more vivid scene.
Paper Lenses
A good way to help students begin to see the power of the camera to shape what a viewer sees on the screen is to have students roll up a piece of paper, loosely to start so that ends barely meet and the circle is relatively large. Students will look through the “lens” at objects at a distant and then zoom in for close-ups of a specific object or person. Students will also use their “lens” to look at different angled shots. You can stand on the table and students use their lens to look up to you. You can sit in a chair or on the floor and students stand on their chairs to look down to you. You can also have students cover their lens with their other hand whenever you clap to get a sense of the difference in the speed of the cuts of the film.
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