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Health & Fitness

Behind the Scenes: Student Filmmakers Complete Filming for City of Elk Grove

Members of the Foulks Ranch Film Academy have completed 2 days of filming for the City of Elk Grove.

That's a wrap! At 4:03 PM on March 27 several students from the Foulks Ranch Film Academy-the home to Curiosity Films-completed filming for a project commissioned by the City of Elk Grove's Integrated Waste Department. 

The 5 minute film will inform residents of Elk Grove and surrounding areas how to properly package and safely transport household hazardous waste to the city's new Special Waste Collection Center currently under construction. 

The film project was the result of the work begun by my 6th grade students three years ago when particpating in Project Citizen, a civic education program which teaches students how to monitor and influence public policies. Students then proposed placing battery collection stations at all Elk Grove schools. The proposal was not possible due to a lack of funds, but last students from my class last year picked up the topic again and met with Cedar Kehoe, our city's Integrated Waste Manager, to propose just one battery collection point. It was at this time Cedar proposed my students create an instructional film for the city's new Special Waste Collection Center. 

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Check out the behind the scenes reel to get an idea of what these kids have accomplished thus far!

As a teacher, there's nothing more rewarding than to watch your students apply what they've learned and to blend it with their own creativity and wisdom. And that's precisely what happened! 

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For two days, I took off my teacher badge and put on my executive producer hat, assisting and listening, guiding and following my students as they worked to get that perfect camera angle, adjust that light, work that slider or camera crane to capture the best shot they could. We weren't teacher and students...we were coworkers on a movie set, collaborating. 

The day after our shoot, I had the chance to speak with Suzie Boss from Edutopia about what my students were doing. Suzie is a project based learning expert and author of several books on the subject. I described my students' role and how this project was rooted in literacy and that the filmmaking component was simply the final expression of text they had read and comprehended, of writing they had drafted and revised. A film-any film-is ultimately a story. And my students have spent the better part of a school year figuring out how to tell the residents of Elk Grove the story of how to safely package and transport household hazardous waste to our new Special Waste Collection Center. 

And by summer of 2013, we are eager to share this story with you.

Stay tuned for more video updates as the project enters postproduction and the editing begins!  

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