Book Club Activity: 'Three Word Review' Video.

Another Book Club activity idea! The members in the book club I help run are aged 11/12. Older, surlier teens might not get wildly enthusiastic about this one.  

What you need:

• A Camera

• Squares of paper/Bright Felt tips

• Willing participants!

• A computer with basic movie editing software installed onto it. Most Windows and Apple laptops come with pre-installed programs. If you don’t like these, there are a few great alternatives – Google search (or y’know…Bing search. Whatever) ‘Free Movie Editing Software’.

So the idea was originally to video the students shouting out three words they felt would best describe their favourite book we’ve read so far. However as the microphone wasn’t brilliant on the camera I had, I took photos of them holding up a piece of card with a word on it instead. So three cards in all, per student (although some chose to do less). See an example below:

Sorry for the quality, it's mega zoomed in to edit out the student holding it!

For the more camera shy members in the group, I took a picture of their handwritten ‘single-word review’ card with the book that they had chosen to ‘review’. One pupil helped me with the photo-taking too. There’re lots of jobs for everyone, and if you did it with a tech-savvy group, you could off-load the editing job over to them too.

So I finally have all these photos. I download some suitably funky music – in this case ‘You can’t stop the Beat’ from Hairspray and, using a basic movie maker software, insert the photos so that they play in time to the music. I insert a little stop motion introduction, completed by myself, and some credits, making sure to include everyone who took part, not just the ones in the photos, and voila! One video!

It’s surprising how much they appreciated it. They all loved seeing the pictures of each other, and having a giggle at the dramatic members who had posed very stylishly, and I even got a round of applause at the end! If you run a book club, you should suggest doing something like this, as it’s quite simple to put together and is a good thing to watch for a more chilled out session. Whilst taking the photos, make sure you record what book each of the students are reviewing – otherwise you’re left with a load of pictures and no idea which book anyone is talking about!

Happy filming!

Over and out.