If you have ever lived with another person and come home to find them in a bad mood, how long did it take you to figure it out? Hours? Minutes? Seconds? Most people say “seconds,” and some can tell before they even enter the same room.

That’s how children feel when they enter your classroom. They can tell within a minute or so whether they will like it or not. Research says within the first five minutes, but I think it’s faster.

Once that attitude is formed, it takes a lot to change it. So teachers are best served by following the example of television shows that often make the first five minutes the best of the show so the audience won’t change the channel. ”  Dr Richard Curwin

In a post originally published on Edutopia, Dr Curwin gives us three fantastic ways to make sure your lesson starts with students in the right frame of mind; excited and ready to learn. One of these strategies is ‘to use a teaser’
 
 

The Trailer Teaser

We’ve all seen iMovie, but have you used it to make the first five minutes of your art lesson engaging?  In the classroom iMovie trailers can be used as an exciting hook for techniques and processes. While the story lines do not automatically match the content you would present to students, with a little creativity and artistic licence they can lend themselves to many useful areas in the art room.  Have a look at this example…

And once you start using your imagination, you’ll find that the uses are endless…

Must Have Resource!

To help your students use iMovie, or for classrooms without 1:1 devices, Tony Vincent has put together an excellent resource full of great ideas, teaching tips and printable iMovie template PDFs.  Use them to help students storyboard on paper as they plan to create their movie magic.

I’m not the only one who loves using iMovie to get students excited about a task…

” Trailers are great ways to get audiences excited about upcoming events, movies and books, but how about creating hype for your lesson?! Ms. Lee, one of BPE’s awesome art teachers decided to do just that! She created this iMovie trailer to prepare her students for an upcoming lesson on contour lines. After she played the trailer, kids were totally hyped to draw using contour lines! Who wouldn’t want to draw a shoe after that kind of intro! ” See Mrs Lee’s iMovie introduction to contour drawing here.

If you liked this article, see this post which includes lesson ideas and a full gallery of abstractions as one representational image is transformed using apps in workflows.