Character Counts

When students enter 6th grade, it seems that the cliques start to really manifest themselves. Therefore, I thought it would be a good idea for the students working in groups of three's to create a video that showed a positive character trait.

The first thing I did was ask the class what the word character meant to them? Students raised their hands and I got answers like someone in a play, to a Disney character or something that a person has - reputation. We discussed that this was the definition I was looking for and then the students listed character traits that they thought are important for a person to have.

I was sent a cd from the website www.values.com - The Foundation for a Better Life, that has short 30 - 45 second commercials that portray different values or character traits. We watched this cd and I told the students to be looking not only at what value they were showing but how it was filmed. Did they use talking to get their point across or just acting with music?

After that we talked about some of the different ways that the people filmed their value and what was effective, etc. I then showed them the Mino Flip camera and how they worked and how easy it was to make a video using this camera.

The students were given a class period to each use the camera and check out the different features. They then had several days to work on their videos and get them created. The students had to ok their character word by me to help prevent several groups using the same word and this insured a variety of videos.