With the Annual Manaiakalani Film Festival fast approaching, we are ready for the just in time check in that our kids are up to speed with Cybersmart blog commenting.
Blog commenting is an integral part of our literacy program but not always directly taught each and every week. With such a big push this week on blog comments, we wanted to come up with an activity that honed these skills and brought the known blogging kaupapa to the forefront of the kids' minds.
We've experienced a lot of success this year using analogue strategies to promote discussion and collaboration. We decided to tackle this challenge creatively using paper, glue and scissors.The children were grouped in friendship groups that would encourage talking and sharing, but also getting the task completed.
The task was to watch 4 old Maniakalani Film Festival movies from years past - we purposely chose movies that we knew the children would not have watched - however, we also chose movies that were created by older siblings/cousins - to enhance some connection and engagement.
We gave the children pre-crafted sentences that pertained to a particular movie as well as more generic sentences that could match almost any movie. The challenge was to select three sentences that matched each movie to create a comprehensive comment. There was a lot of need for discussion and reasoning as the groups tried to narrow down which sentences were best fit for which movie.
Each group then glued their selected sentences onto a template in order to complete their comment.
The challenges faced by the children were around actually watching the movies and paying close attention to what set each movie apart and to find matching comments.
They also struggled with realising that the movies were "tabbing" within the browser and that they needed to hunt back in previous tabs to find the links of movies still needed to watch.
The "reward" for getting the comments completed was to have access to the entire back catalogue of Manaiakalani Movies - an absolute treat as the kids explored literal hours of child generated content.
