imovie trailers

As usual my best ideas for teaching either hit me as I'm in the shower or driving to work. As I pulled up to the school yesterday and began rethinking what I wanted to do yesterday with my junior English class, I decided to introduce imovie to them. Since we were reading Edgar Allen Poe ("The Masque of the Red Death," "The Black Cat," "The Raven," and possibly "The Fall of the House of Usher," which has never been one of my favorites), I recalled how great of a time they had working on their creative projects yesterday and decided to take it one step further (or is it farther?). I told them if they wanted to get out of the American Romanticism test, they could choose to create a 2 minute imove trailer for one of the Poe pieces we read. So then I hooked up a projector (I was fortunate enough to be able to check one out from the library at the last minute, but that tends to be how I always operate) and connected it to my MacBook and showed them how to create an imovie with pictures and video and music. Then I played them the little "Monster Mash" piece I created for KoKo.

Now we'll see whether they take me up on it or not.

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Today - obviously - I am not at work. I burned a personal day to get my "McEssay" done. Since I last worked on it - Monday night - I was able to get to 21 pages (the submitted essay is to be between 20 and 25 pages). I just don't know that I'm happy with all of the pages. Kristie, bless her heart, has read it more times that she cares too, but her advice is invaluable. She made me realize how much I absolutely love starting sentences with conjunctions. And I don't know why!

She also has a great eye for what I should cut or add.

Hopefully, today I can finish it. Then I have to do my lesson plan for the MNHS. After that I have to start working on the Six Traits Training sessions credit I signed up for via Colorado State. Oh boy.