Multimedia All About Me for Grades 1 & 2

I love doing All About Me activities at the start of the year, particularly with younger grades; they’re fresh from an adventurous summer, and super excited to be in school again. 

This activity focuses on the students’ reflections, and captures them in a way that can be quite adorable. Fair warning: depending on the grade you teach, this can take many lesson blocks to complete, but you can always adjust to taste. In this post I’ll focus on the technical side of the activity. 

The iPad app I use is called Book Creator. The free version allows for the creation of one book, but for a few bucks it’s definitely worth being able to create unlimited books, especially if your students learn the app at the beginning of the year with this activity. Many teachers have leveraged the learning from this activity to have students demonstrate their knowledge in a variety of different subjects in Book Creator afterwards.

In a nutshell, students create a picture book about themselves, then get video recorded “reading” the book. 

Each page of the book has a prompt: In the summer, My hobbies are, My friends are, I’m looking forward to, I’m worried about, In school this year I want to learn about, When I grow up. Of course you can adjust these to suit your own needs. In previous years I had students type the prompt, but that became quite tedious at the very young grades, so now I Airdrop a template with a pre-filled text box on each page. 

 

If you’ve used Book Creator before, then you know that students of all grades will enjoy the formatting options available to them, so my plain template gets quite colourful and fun in short order. 

For the content of the pages, I show the students how to add “Text”, but then tap the emoji icon on the keyboard to access the full offerings of Apple’s emoji library. 

Pro tip: have the students hit “done” after each emoji they select, otherwise long strings of the little pictures will be grouped together, limiting their formatting and placement options. After the first few, even grade one students know how to get back to the emoji library and then the Inspector to resize them to their liking. With some creative thinking, I’ve seen emojis used in combination with each other to express even the most obscure activities or jobs you can imagine! One popular creation is the TV emoji with a red triangle emoji overlaid in the centre: YouTuber.

 

I usually have the students draw a picture of their family on the last page, which lets them get their little fingers into the drawing tools of Book Creator (which are surprisingly capable!).   For the recording setup, I’m fortunate enough to have a projector with an Apple TV in my room, as well as some portable lights and a wireless microphone. With the student a few feet in front and to the side of the projector screen and their iPad connected via Airplay to the Apple TV, they are free to have the iPad in their lap and flip the pages naturally, while we can all see (and record) the book projected on the screen behind them. Ideally, the lights would be off for the best projector image, and some barn doors on the portable lights really help to light the student without washing out the projector image. A wireless mic is a must for those very quiet, shy younger students.   If you don’t have access to a projector, I’ve also done this with the students reading the “book” like a teacher librarian would, showing the pictures to the camera after each page. Alternatively, the iPad can be on a stand, and the students can sit beside it, reaching over to turn the “pages” as needed. Okay, I’ll stop with the quotation marks.

One of the features I love about Book Creator is that it readily exports a variety of formats, including ePub (for viewing or editing later), and .mov for sharing as a video. Although the delightful page-turn animation doesn’t make it to the video export, the readily viewable format makes it easy for teachers and parents alike. 

I'm happy to answer any questions about this fun, reflective activity, just let me know!

I love my job!