I've done this activity with newcomers several times, and each time becomes a new opportunity for learning.
Students need to know a few vocabulary items for the house and some basic prepositions. One of the goals of this unit is to have students read and re-read familiar text for fluency. This step happens mostly when the kids are narrating their finished stories.
Here is the process:
Teach your students the names of a few rooms in the house, some items of furniture for each one, and four basic prepositions: in, on, under, behind, in front of, beside. Use flashcards for this step of the activity. For some of your learners, this could take a few games and activities to reinforce the vocabulary. My flashcards came from A Walk in the Chalk's Kristin Vibas.
On a pocket chart, set up sentence frames like this:
Your learners will practise saying the dialogue with a partner and changing the room, object in the room and preposition three times. After the final room and object, the student happily exclaims, "I found it!"
Here is an example of the dialogue:
A: Where is my bear?
B: It is in the living room.
A: Where?
B: It is behind the sofa.
A: It's not there. Where is my bear?
B: It is in the bedroom.
A: Where?
B: It is under the bed.
A: It's not there. Where is my bear?
B: It is in the kitchen.
A: Where?
B: It is in front of the sink.
A: I found it!
Once they are familiar with the dialogue format, your students can write their own story, choosing rooms, objects of furniture and prepositions. I tell them they must use three different rooms, three different objects of furniture and three different prepositions.
After writing their story, they are ready for filming. I have an old dollhouse from when my daughter was little, so I bring that in. Alternatively, you can have groups make their own houses or room sets. I've downloaded house templates in the past, and they work quite well.
For our projects, we used iMotion. We spend one period getting used to how the app works, and practise moving the characters so it looks like they are walking. I tell students to take a picture for every word the character says, and for every step they take. They need to have their dialogue pages nearby, so they know the order of rooms for filming. Make sure the camera is close enough to the set to fill the shot. Characters will talk and move for each scene. Once the scene is complete, students can move the camera to the next room. By the end of filming, students should have approximately 75-100 shots for their movie. When the filming is completed, the app replays the movie at 15 frames per second. I move the slider to 3 frames per second before saving it to the iPad photo gallery.
The next step is to include the audio. The student needs to be watching the movie while reading his/her lines. This is done in iMovie. It can take quite a few tries for your student to get the words to match up with the movements.
It's worthwhile to just scroll through the frames of the video with your finger, while matching the words to the action there. Then, once the student is very familiar with the lines, he/she can record them. Patience is an important ingredient!
For a copy of the dialogue to use with this project, you can find it here:
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