What I do on Sunday... Achieve!

I'm in cleaning mode. Well, my wife is in cleaning mode for the holidays. She is also a good photographer and has a nice camera. She has promised that I can borrow her camera, if I get all of the Christmas stuff upstairs and do some laundry.

Deal.

What do I need the camera for? Two semesters ago, I had to put together a video for a class project. I decided to cover the Battle of Rorke's Drift using minis I had on hand. Being me, I couldn't just do a PowerPoint, it was stop motion all the way.

Proof of concept video

Oh, but I couldn't stop there. I wanted actual students to participate. So I nervously packed up all of my figures and terrain and brought them into my 6:1:3 classroom. I have to say, my staff really didn't understand what was happening, but they did their best to help.

At the end of the day, I found that my lesson plans were wildly out of spec for 6 student with autism, so I brought in the NPC Players to help me out. The NPC Players are my children, Nathan, Catherine and Paul. I asked them to read the script which were based of social studies lesson plans I presented in my classroom. Since my children couldn't come into my classroom due to various privacy and safety concerns, I had to work backwards and sideways to create script based of adapted lesson plans for 10 year olds. Every evening for weeks, the NPC Players and I tried to make the script come to life in stop motion form.

I got an A on this assignment, but I honestly don't believe my professor had a good handle on how much I achieved. One teacher, one teaching assistant, 2 classroom aides (sometimes different people), 6 10 year old students, who happen have autism remotely working with 3 typical middle and high school students, all working together to produce an understandably scripted video and associated adapted lesson plans to meet my professor's college class standards. It was quite an achievement.

At the end of the day, it was a bridge to far. The audio we worked so hard to produce bombed big time. But I would totally do it again. I think my students and children gave a great grasp of the historical event.


One last task has remained undone since the end of the project. The clean up. 9 kids and 4+ adults made a hash of my models. A mess that remains to this day.

Over the Christmas break, I plan on reorganizing my models and post images of them here.

Here are some examples images of random figures from the jumbled hash.