Duration: 2:54
Students from years 6,7,8 at Mt Biggs School share how their writing improved through the process of making a documentary.
Ollie
Our documentary is on eels. Where they live, what they eat.
Ethan
And we're making it so that people that don't know much about eels, they’ll know more about eels. We just came up with questions that we couldn't find on the internet or didn't give us a good enough answer.
Ollie
So we just really thought about the dam and thought how we're gonna do some of the stuff. So we made a Google Doc. If we didn't have an introduction and stuff no one would know what it's about and it would just be jumbled up.
Ethan
For the introduction we just said what we were doing it on. Then the point one was the habitat, and two was what they eat, and then three was just a whole bunch of facts.
Ollie
Mark Patterson he came from Horizons, and he was a marine biologist. So we interviewed him. He told us all about the eels, and the bugs, and the algae in the water.
Max
He told me about long fins and short fins. I sort of knew that the long fin and short fin were in our dam before but I didn't know that we had morays in New Zealand and lots of other species.
Ollie
Max wanted to do camera angles. Our template is just a grid that's got boxes and we write down our camera angles and then we write down our names beside it. So if there was a long shot, say, Max would be doing the long shot.
Ethan
I would have got better at planning, that would have been the main thing and then like how to write it out.
Max
So my favourite has been getting out there and doing it and doing the research. I prefer it over writing in the book.
Ethan
Making videos to do with writing is a really fun activity and you learn a whole bunch of new stuff. Not sitting at a table writing in a book. Going down to the dam and doing work down there and all that stuff was my favourite bit.
Max
I’ve showed my mum and dad ... just the bit that we caught the eels.
Ollie
Yes there has been some exciting things about it, like finding out a whole lot of facts and just searching on the internet about them. Well before we got to do this we were already eeling in the school dam. So then we knew there were eels there, so we had to do something around the school. So Ethan and I instantly clicked onto eels.