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Room 231 watching the premier of “The Chase”.<\/p><\/div>\n

Some of my awesome students wrote, performed, and edited a silent movie. \u00a0They read the book “The Invention of Hugo Cabret”<\/a> and watched the silent movies mentioned in the book. \u00a0The book is written as a silent movie, a detail I kept hidden from them until the end of the book. \u00a0The book follows Hugo through a train station in Paris as he tries to rebuild an automaton that his father was working on at the time of his death. \u00a0Hugo, an orphan, is forced to steal the parts he needs from a toy shop owner that turns out to be the famous (and real) filmmaker\u00a0George Melies.<\/a>\u00a0 During the book my students came across the names of some of the earliest silent movies. \u00a0I had my students watch the movies that were mentioned in the story to gain background knowledge about the time period in which this story was set. \u00a0The movies are quite different from the movies that they\u00a0see now.<\/p>\n

The best find this year was the video about Buster Keaton<\/a>. \u00a0The video highlights his\u00a0career in silent movies. \u00a0He was definitely the master of the “gag”. \u00a0My students’s final video was definitely influenced by how\u00a0Buster Keaton made movies. \u00a0 I have included the videos that we watched while reading the book below.<\/p>\n

I always try to end the novels we read with a creative challenge. \u00a0For Hugo, I challenged my students to create a silent movie that told a story in the style of the movies that we watched and the book we read. \u00a0\u00a0Below is their final product. \u00a0Enjoy THE CHASE!<\/p>\n