Pen Pal Letters as Mini Movies
As the culminating project for our year long Pen Pal Project, students in grades 2 through 5 animated their final letters using the computer program iMovie. The process involved students writing a traditional letter using the writing process of pre-writing, drafting, editing and revising. As a final step, we envisioned our letters as movies and gathered photos from the Internet. We looked up photos using keywords from our letters and decided which ones would best convey the ideas in our letters. Finally, we narrated our letters matching our voices to the appropriate pictures. We then used our student created rubric to assess ourselves.
This was our first attempt at this in our ESL class. We learned a lot along the way!
Check out our individual iMovie letters. First up is our letters to the students in Ms. Avelluto’s class at P.S. 131 in Brooklyn. Ms. Avelluto, please have your students write a quick comment to their pal using the comment feature! Enjoy!
a
Dear Anna,
I really enjoyed watching your iMovie. You did a great job matching the pictures to your ideas in your letter. I’m excited to see what you do next!
From, Ms. Cohen
Dear,Christian.N It sounds clear and loud.I enjoyed the imove because it sounds good.
Dear Justin, I love your movie because it is fun. can you write to me?
Dear Anna,
I like your pictures from your movie and I think you need to talk clear in the movie.
From ,Michelle
Dear Anna
I love
Dear Michelle I like the pictures you rock you are the best
Dear Anna,
I love your imovie. It is cool it is fun.
love Jennifer,8
Dear Michelle I like the picture that said scared.
From justin
Dear Jennifer,
Thank you for sending my your movie letter. My favorite animal is a lion, Have a good vacation.
From Rodrigo
Dear Anna
I liked your letter. The swimming pool was nice. Have a nice vacation.
What country are you from? What languages do you speak? I am from Bangladesh and I speak Bengali.
From Ahamed
Dear Christian
Thanks for sending me your letter. I like to play dodgeball too.
My favorite thing to do in school is read. Have a good summer vacation.
From Jason
Dear Carmen
I liked your movie. I play dodgeball too. I play baseball and basketball
with my friends, too. I am from Mexico.
From Esai
Dear Michelle
I like your presentation about the army in China. It was interesting.
I made a slideshow using KidPix about bears this year. It is almost finished. I need to put music in it. Have a nice summer vacation.
From Veronica
To all of Ms. Cohen’s students:
You guys did great work on these videos! I’m impressed by how quickly you got them done, and how clearly you were able to communicate using video and the Internet.
See you next year!
To the pen pals:
Welcome! Great to see your comments on these videos! Stay in touch with us next year!
Have a great summer,
Mr. Rhys
Dear Justin I like your pictures of the imovie. Your voice of the imovie sounds good. Do you like your movie? How much pictures did you put in your imovie? FROM CHRISTIAN BRAVO
Dear Ahamed,
Thanks for watching my movie.I’m from mexico.
Dear Rosa I REALLY Liked your video! from fryda
Dear Kimberly,
I really like your movie because you talk loud and that good because you have to talk loud don’t you right bye,bye,bye Kimberly you are my best friend.
sincerely Rosa
DEAR KIM YOUR MOVIE MAKES ME HUNGERY FROM FRYDA
Dear Mr.T,
I really like your movie because when Ben was asking you a
a question it looks like Ben is having problems with his body.
That was really funny. Mr.t nice comic books. The way the pictures
are is like in the History channel.