Commercial Breaks

It has been way too long since I have posted, but I think it is about time I got back at it.

I was lying in bed, not sleeping, and had an idea (most of my ideas tend to happen in these moments, what about your's?). What if I had "commercials" in class? Every kid needs a break and when they just aren't able to listen to me, perhaps a quick commercial break would do the trick.

So I began to think practically, what would I want the commercials to be like? Well...I would use them for:
- Making announcements
- Reminders about upcoming due dates
- A way to review the Bible verse we are memorizing
- A way to study a difficult spelling word we are working on
- Perhaps even have a commercial to quickly review some math facts

These are all things I would normally do with my class, but instead of listening to the "Wha Wha Wha" of their teacher's voice (Peanuts reference, if you didn't get it) perhaps they would watch a commercial for it instead and get more out of it. After all, we are teaching a generation that is very visual and technology driven. Why not change the way I do a couple of things to see if it would more effective for the kids I teach?

This morning I pulled up Windows Movie Maker and made a simple video commercial to try out my idea. Here's how it turned out:

I'm going to try making some more and test it out next week just as an experiment. It can't hurt to try, right?!

What are you thoughts on this? Is anyone else doing this?

(Just to cover myself: The music for the video is "Drive to the Cottage" by Jan A.P. Kaczmarek from Finding Neverland)