Staveley Primary School is a small village school in the Lake District. We have a diverse mix of pupils including children with SEN and English as an additional language. We have used resources from Into Film in class and our school film club to boost literacy and support calendar days and topics in the curriculum.
One of the resources we have used is the Make Film - Greatest Generation presentation and teacher notes, which contains activities and guidance to engage pupils with archive film and documentary filmmaking. We used clips embedded in the presentation to teach children about the genre of documentary. The timeline cards enabled the children to increase their understanding of chronology and ensure they were clear on the period of history their documentary needed to focus on. The clips and archive footage inspired the children and highlighted areas for them to focus on.
The project tied in perfectly with our history work on Victory in Europe day and the 70th anniversary. Many children were so motivated by it they spoke to relatives and embarked on personal research. We held our own Peace in Europe day and invited people who were children at the time of the war to talk about their experiences. This gave the children opportunity to develop their interviewing skills.
The resources also support children's learning about filmmaking techniques, camera shots and aspects to consider like sound and lighting. The children had the opportunity to edit their work and incorporate archive footage and photographs they had taken. Additional skills they developed through making their documentaries were teamwork, communication and listening skills. They were thrilled with their documentaries and showed a real sense of pride in their work. They were able to show them to our local MP, Tim Farron, who was very impressed with the hard work they had put into them.
