90-Second Newbery Film Festival: Free Curriculum for Drama Coordinators, Teachers, & Librarians

Teachers, drama coaches, librarians, and parents: Here’s a fun project that will get your students reading Newbery winners. Students, here’s an excuse to mess around with video equipment. Librarians, here’s an activity to do with your teen advisory boards. Anyone can enter. Everyone wins! The 90-Second Newbery Film Festivalis a contest open to anyone, but especially to kids.

The goal is simple:

Create a video that compresses the story of a Newbery award-winning book into 90 seconds or less, using (at least mostly) kid actors.

James Kennedy (author of The Order of Odd-Fish) is the originator of the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival. Here is the sample video he created to get the ball rolling:

The 90-Second Newbery Film Festival receives hundreds of submissions from all over the world. Each year, the judges selected the best submissions and take the winning films on a tour around the country. The film screening events are open to the public and are sponsored by libraries, writing and film societies, and other media outlets.

It's free to enter, but most important, everyone who teams up to create one of these videos is a winner: They'll receive feedback from 90-Second Newbery founder James Kennedy, and the experience of working with other kids to create the film will live for a lifetime--and looks great on college applications.

Will you and the kids on your team develop one of this year's winners?

The 90-Second Newbery team is helping you to do just that! This year, they are providing a FREE detailed step-by-step curriculum that will help teachers, drama coaches, home school coordinators, and librarians help their team create an AWESOME short video. It includes meeting instructions, tips on video creation, and worksheets to keep you organized. Download the FREE 90-Second Newbery Curriculum (PDF file) here!

Here is another winning 2011 video to give you ideas: