For my digital storytelling critique this week I wanted to try to find a video about the seasons that I could show my daughter. I found a few very homemade looking videos that just included too much jargon for my daughter to understand. Finally, I found a video called Seasons Song Video that had a fun tune and explained each seasons pretty basically. The only word used in the video that my daughter didn’t understand was ‘climate’. How do you explain ‘climate’ to a three year old? It is about as easy as explain what noise a giraffe makes. Overall I found the video to be very successful.
There is a tune that is very catchy and while I could see parents getting tired of it quickly, toddler’s seem to enjoy the repetition of tunes. My daughter danced along with the video and when it was over she made me repeat it several times until she knew it well enough to sing along to parts of it. Referencing my reading this week, I feel like the video was more of a ‘surface learning’ experience because it had a lot of repetition and I think she more got what the words were to match to the picture of the season instead of understanding exactly what seasons are. That being said though I found it to be a great spring board to then discuss the seasons with my daughter in a deeper and more meaningful way. After the video we went outside and talked about how sunny it is and that it is summer time. Given her age I feel that it will take some time to completely wrap her head around the meaning but she is definitely getting there.
I think the animated pictures of each seasons really brought this video to life. I enjoyed for example that when it signs about spring it shows it raining and then the flowers blooming. That got me thinking though because in the state of Washington is rains mainly in the winter and only snows once maybe twice a year where we live. Based on my knowledge of literacy dimensions I would make some modifications to the video. One major change I would make would be to include some parts in there where a person comes on and explains each season in a bit more detail. Doing so would provide a deeper meaning for each season.
laurenrazuriblog 