“The main thing that you have to remember on this journey is, just be nice to everyone and always smile.” – Ed Sheeran

As part of the Iditarod Summer Camp for Educators, we are given the opportunity to hook up with a rookie musher and follow them throughout the year.  My class is working with Cindy Abbott.  The students are very excited to have the opportunity to follow and communicate with her this year.

Our first task was to get to know Cindy.  Our final goal was to create a movie preview for each class period.   With students working in small groups, they used a question sheet to find out information about Cindy.  Their task was to use Cindy’s website,  www.reachingbeyondtheclouds.com and the Iditarod website, www.iditarod.com.  During this portion of the lesson the students learned a lot of interesting information about Cindy.

After we discussed their information and checked out a few pictures and video clips, each class chose a theme they would focus on for their preview.  Each class had a different focus; the Iditarod, Cindy’s accomplishments while having a disease, and the disease she has.  The groups then chose what their written statement in the preview would be, which would help them design their video clip.  For example, “A story about a woman and her dogs.”

Now the fun part.  It’s time to design and film our small clips of video.  Students had great ideas on how to represent their specific part of the preview.  Time to edit.  After learning and discussing how to import video into the program we were using, we began creating our preview.  Video clips, pictures, titles, text, and credits were all edited and turned into a final movie preview.

The movie previews turned out fantastic, in my opinion.  The students had a great time designing, creating, and editing them.  Our final step was to upload the movie previews to our YouTube page and share them to Twitter and our class website.  We tagged Cindy so she could watch them, she loved them.  View all three previews below.

Movie previews are a great way to give information in a quick way.  Think about having your students research a musher and design a movie preview.  Use the lesson plan and worksheet below as a guide to researching and creating a movie about a musher of your choice. Another great idea would be after reading a book, create a preview about the book being made into a movie.

Worksheet used to discover:  Who is Cindy Abbott

Lesson Plan:  Making a Classroom Movie 

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All video in trailers filmed at Camanche Middle School by students.  Any pictures used provided by Erin Montgomery and Cindy Abbott (with permission).