The World of Longfellow 10

I was adding some of our digital science picture books to the Longfellow 10 site this morning when I realized what an accomplishment that site has achieved over the course of the year. The Longfellow 10 is (as George writes at the site) a: “… loose confederation of unknown students in undisclosed locations in cyberspace looking to promote awareness of important literary terms (and Science Concepts!) through absurd stop-motion films.” And more.

My students are now launching into a final project in literature class. We divided the class into two and one group read The Watsons Go to Birmingham and the other read Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. Both books are powerful examples of racial tension and the need for tolerance. SO, with just a few short weeks left, we are doing a claymation project around the theme of tolerance. Our aim is to publish the movies at Longfellow 10 before school gets out. I’m not sure we can make it, but we’re going to give it a try. They were storyboarding yesterday and will begin making clay characters today and maybe start filming tomorrow. We’re on a tight schedule!

I’ll reflect more as we go.

But check out the movies at Longfellow 10 and share them with your students. This is a list of subject categories from the site. And think about bringing stopmotion into your classroom:

• Air Masses
• Air Pressure
• Antagonist
• Cell Mitosis
• Character vs. Nature
• Characterization
• Clouds
• Cold Front
• Condensation
• Continental Drift
• Dialogue
• Enunciate
• evolution
• Fiction
• Foreshadowing
• Hurricanes
• Imagery
• Inference
• Infiltration
• Intro
• LF10 Challenge
• Literary Conflcit
• minerals
• Mood
• Narrative Point of View
• Non-Fiction
• Orographic Cooling
• Personification
• Plot
• Plot Diagram
• Protagonist
• Resolution
• Rising Action
• rocks
• Setting
• Tragedy
• Warm Front
• Wind

Peace (in the frames).
Kevin