As our current novel study requires students to investigate the Hero’s Quest, I continue to tie together my COETAIL assignments with the needed preparation for my classes.
With this post, I slew the Jabberwock (aka iMovie) in an attempt to create a compilation of the work students have completed thus far in their journey to understand the Hero’s Quest. This video shares the stages of student learning over a series of lessons. It begins with the analysis of John Tenniel’s illustration of the Jabberwock, whiffles through to some examples of student generated narrative poems that showcase the quest behind the image, and ends with the reading of Lewis Carroll’s poem, “The Jabberwock”.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Throughout the process of creating this video, I felt as though I myself was a bumbling beast whiffling through a dense forest burbling. What I thought would be a fairly simple process was much more time consuming than I anticipated.
A huge hurdle was trying to capture images that didn’t present blurry once I uploaded them to the video (I never succeeded with this). Because I wanted snippets of students poems, the only way I could see how to capture a stanza was to take a screenshot of it. No matter how many times I tried, they all came out blurry in the end. I’m certain there is a better way, I just haven’t figured it out yet.
Another obstacle was filming students reading the poem. Sometimes my filming was crystal clear, sometimes blurry. Sometimes the audio was clear, sometimes muffled. The students were highly tolerant of my lack of skill and were more than willing to repeat their performance as needed. Sixth graders are so forgiving.
The time spent planning, creating, editing and revising was plentiful. Going through the process, although frustrating, was hugely helpful and eye opening. It certainly got me thinking about what we ask of students without considering all the skills that are involved and the time it takes to produce quality work.
I have slain the Jabberwock, and my eyes have been opened to new understandings; this is not the end of my quest.
