Ladies and Gentlemen, I had the great pleasure of co-hosting the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival at the beautiful Downtown Minneapolis Library a couple weeks ago. For those of you who don’t know what this is, I encourage you to take a peek at the link here, just to check it out. It is a wondrous thing.
And here is Our Dear Mr. Kennedy’s write-up of the whole experience.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately, and blogging too, about schools and teaching and learning – how we can support teachers in their creation of authentic learning experiences while simultaneously creating classrooms that are places of intellectual curiosity, rigor, creativity, broad knowledge, connection, empathy and joy. And I have never seen so much joy on the faces of that many kids – my goodness! there were tons of them! – as they saw themselves, larger than life on the screen, demonstrating their excellent reading and cooperative play and extended, creative thinking. About books! Great books! It was wonderful.
If you are a teacher (and many of you are) and you are reading this, I hope you will think about incorporating this program into your classrooms next year. These videos require very little investment (many are made using the phones in their pockets, or the video equipment in the media center), and are a great way to introduce books that your students may not have read before. I also highly encourage you to show a couple of these goofy videos to your students in class, just to show the amount of cool things a bunch of kids can make if they put their minds to it.
Kudos, Mr. Kennedy. And kudos to all of you great Minnesotan readers. My hat! It is off!
[vimeo 121146644 w=500 h=281]
[vimeo 118710062 w=500 h=281]