Pre-primary 2 have been on a journey through fiction and non-fiction. After several weeks of busily exploring fairy tales we voted and decided to focus on Peter Pan.
We created dramatic play areas to act out the story, we read and retold the story to develop our comprehension, we created our own alternate endings of Peter Pan, we participated in our favourite character study, we created maps and went on a treasure hunt and SOOO much more.
We then decided that we NEEDED to create our own Peter Pan movie. We discussed the characters and then chose who would be which character. Everyone wanted to either be a pirate, Indian or Peter Pan. We created our costumes and then began filming.
We discovered an issue. Our movie didn’t make sense because we didn’t have enough of the characters and had too many Peter Pan’s, Indians and pirates. We then concluded that we all needed to be different characters to ensure we included everyone in the movie. After some debate and negotiations, we were able to come to a happy conclusion and then each student honed in on their own character to create their costume. Each student designed and created a costume for our movie. It was now time to film again.
After filming we watched our movie and discussed the highlights and areas to improve. We noticed that it didn’t make sense because we didn’t have the “backgrounds” and settings to give it context. We also decided that the camera had to stay still so it didn’t make us dizzy. We created a recycled egg carton pirate ship, mermaid cove and other settings to help give our movie more meaning. We then filmed again but not everyone knew what to say. We researched how real actors make movies. We discovered that real actors have lines and scripts to read to help them know what to say. We chose the major scenes from the book and each actor wrote their own scenes. We then went to film but wait…. Who goes first? All the actors were talking at once or didn’t know when to go. We discovered that the director needs a manuscript to put the lines in the right order. We created a manuscript using the images from the book as prompts. We then rehearsed several times, and ACTION! After 3 hours our movie was complete. We watched it back and the children LOVED it.
We decided to invite parents and families to watch our movie. We created tickets for them to enter, we also created a trailer/ introduction as well as credits/questions posed to the parents such as “what was your favourite part?”
The grand screening was a great success with all families joining us. The children were celebrated for their great work and were able to display their accomplishments in front of their loved ones.
This inquiry project covered numerous curriculum areas and was completely student driven. Students needed to make decisions, work in collaboration, problem solve, negotiate, vote, create graphs and read the data, develop their speaking and listening skills, mapping, design, creativity, story retell and comprehension, learn about fiction stories, characters and settings, writing and reading practice and much more. As students were in charge and focusing on their own character of interest we had 100% participation and student engagement and enthusiasm was extremely high.
