Abstract:

Developing the imagination and creativity of primary school children is one of the most important objectives in education. This can be made in a lot of ways, by storytelling, drawing, using different games. In the same time, we think that is possible to develop the imagination and creativity of children with other modern methods too, like making photos or short videos.

This paper will present an experiment made in Oradea, Romania with primary school children, as a survey which is part of the European Project Erasmus + named MOVIE Project, no. 2017-1-PT01-KA201-035858.

This idea, which we put into practice in our schools, helped us discover how many wonderful and useful things we can do for effective learning with the help of movies.

The objectives of our activities were: obtaining the possibility of step-by-step learning of creating teaching situations depending on the difficulty range of subject, motivate students to use visual language as means of communication, development of learner autonomy, facilitating course explanations and obtaining the ability to see strengths and weaknesses of a presentation as well as the ability to add new ideas on how to get done, enhanced team working and communication skills, development of learner autonomy, retain easier information by using words, sound, and images simultaneously, combine several aspects of the curriculum, being involved in generating and searching for new ideas.

The participants had to elaborate short movie production in recreating fairytales on nowadays, using video capture technique on student-owned mobile devices to facilitate psychomotor skills acquisition.

Primary school children had produced all the sequences of the media content, being supervised by the teachers along with the experts of the project.
The creative challenge of using moving images and sound to communicate a topic indeed engaging and insightful, but it also enabled students to acquire a range of transferable skills in addition to filmmaking itself. These had included research skills, collaborative working, problem solving, technology and organizational skills.

A SWOT analyze of our activity showed us that the project allowed students to: Get inside the mind of a character, and have the character respond accordingly to a situation, retain easier information by using words, sound, and images simultaneously, enhanced team working and communication skills, video projects are a great way to engage younger students for longer stints, facilitating thinking and problem solving.

Keywords:

Imagination, creativity, communication, images, short videos.