Book Marketing: A Different Way to Get Attention for a Book

I have recently had the privilege of working with Allison, Brian, and Lauren on a book trailer project with the Grade 4 students.

It was so much fun to teach the students about the Art of Digital Storytelling. We began by using Bernajean Porter's description of images. This is the craftsmanship phase of digital storytelling. Here is the poster we used with students.

Then we went on to talk about the emotion of the music. Music is what creates the emotions and feelings in our digital stories. It can captivate an audience or make an audience feel confused. Students listened to several different pieces of music on Zaption and wrote the feelings that each piece evoked in them. 

In conjunction with discussing these topics, we also began the process of synthesizing the messages in their books into a book trailer. Students watched several examples of book trailers and created a list of the items that a good book trailer contained. They then analyzed more book trailers with a rubric. At last they began their own journey of creating book trailers with their book club books.

            

Students began creating the book trailer by completing a story arc. Then they thought about the most important parts of the book; parts that were exciting, sad, or dramatic. Along with this, they chose quotes from the text that portrayed the character's traits. Finally, they completed a storyboard that was used to identify the media and script of their trailer.  They are still in the process of finishing their videos but we have seen many close to completion and they are terrific.

   

I was lucky to accompany the teachers through the planning process and was present for many of these lessons. We will be making an Aurasma wall in the library so that the videos are available for our entire community. Look for this in about a week. We can't wait to show off the students wonderful work!