Our official LF10 club t-shirts have finally arrived direct from Squidfire. I’m out of the building for the next two months on paternity leave so please see Mr. Stelzner to purchase your shirt. The shirts come in three colors, a variety of sizes, and cost $10. Get yours now, while supplies last!
The guys at Squidfire were kind enough to take some pictures of the silk screening process used to make our shirts. I used Animoto to quickly make the little video:
The Longfellow Ten is kicking off a stop-motion figurative language challenge. The idea is simple: Create a short, clear, creative stop-motion video depicting an example of a type of figurative language. For more details about this challenge READ THIS.
It’s rumored the Midwest Collective of the LF10 is wrapping up production on a number of new films. Stay tuned for further LF10 developments…
The Longfellow Ten placed First Runner Up in the category of Best Educational Use of Video in the 2009 Edublog Awards. Thanks to everyone who voted for us! Hopefully, some of this recognition will help us in our efforts to recruit new LF10 members. Wanna join?
Our collaborative stop-motion project, The Longfellow Ten, has been nominated for an Edublog Award in the category of Best Educational Use of Video / Visual. Please take a few seconds and VISIT THIS LINK to cast your vote for us!
We here at the LF10 Headquarters are excited about this nomination. However, we’re even more excited that this nomination, and possible award, could help us in our ongoing efforts to recruit some new LF10 members. Wanna join?
The East-Coast Syndicate of The Longfellow Ten (that’s us) has been hard at work over the last few months cranking out new films. We’re on a mission to promote awareness of important academic terms and concepts through absurd stop-motion films.
The new film posted above, Onomatopoeia, was put together last week and involved about a dozen LF10 members. We have lots of new films currently in production. It’s also rumored that the mysterious Midwest Collective of the LF10 (Minnesotans I believe) are about to start posting some new films. Please stop by the official Longfellow Ten website and leave these young stop-motion film creators an encouraging comment!
Last year, Mr. Stelzner, a colleague of mine, and I started our collaborative after-school stop-motion project, The Longfellow Ten. We thought it would be fun, and useful, to have students create absurd stop-motion films about important literary terms. We also thought it would be helpful to share our films online, so others could use the site as a resource in the classroom.
We recruited a few other middle school teachers in other states to join our project. Kevin Hodgson, a teacher in Massachusetts, and his 6th grade students, head up the Northern Contingent of the Lf10. Ben Upton, a middle school teacher in Minnesota, jumped in with his students and started making stop-motion films about science concepts for the Midwest Collective of the LF10. Mr. Stelzner and I, and our students, make up the East Coast Syndicate.
In a little over a year, we have collectively added 52 stop-motion films to our official LF10 website. Students have created films that cover 43 different academic terms and concepts. We have over 170 comments on our various films, and over 4,000 page views to the site. We are hoping to continue to expand the project this year, and recruit new members. If you are interested in getting your students involved, or have any questions, please let us know. It’s not necessary to have any experience with stop-motion. A year ago, we didn’t have any experience ourselves!
At the end of the school year a few Longfellow Ten students and I became kind of obsessed with a popular stop-motion film on YouTube called Deadline. It was created by an art student at Savannah College of Art and Design using thousands of post-it notes.
Well, this summer, VHD, an LF10 member, created his own post-it note stop motion film in response to Deadline. He worked for three hours a day over the last three weeks in my classroom while I taught summer school. He used over 2,000 post-it notes. He also made a time-lapse video of himself creating the film:
Most impressive of all, VHD came in each day over the last three weeks at 7:30 am during the summer to work on it. His effort really shines through. Check out more of VHD’s stop-motion films, on his YouTube channel.
p.s. Hope everyone is having a pleasant summer!
What: Film Festival
Where: A beautifully restored movie house (pictured above)
When: June 1st
Who: My 6th & 7th grade Film Literacy students (& LF10!) & their families/friends
Why: To share all the films we’ve created in our classroom this year!
We have three weeks to complete all current productions. It’s major crunch time. Can we pull it off?
Our after-school stop motion club, The Longfellow Ten, is in the news this week. The Scholastic weblog, On Our Minds, embedded our newest video on their blog yesterday and wrote a post about our club. We also have a group of new LF10 students in Minnesota that have added a video called Drifting With Alfred. The video is about Continental Drift, the scientific theory developed by Alfred Wegener. We’ve had to slightly alter the LF10 mission statement to now include Science Concepts:
The LF10 is a loose confederation of unknown students in undisclosed locations in cyberspace looking to promote awareness of important literary terms (and Science Concepts!) through absurd stop-motion films.