06 March 2007

Tasty Homework

On the lunch menu today is leftover lomo saltado, courtesy of M's Spanish project. She's been wanting to cook for a Spanish project for the past two years, but I've always made her do a written report instead. I was thinking of when I was in high school and students had to actually bring the dish to class; there was no way M could manage that with the two bus exchanges she has to make.

Enter technology. The teacher said that the food itself didn't have to be brought in as long as the student proved that she cooked it herself. So M decided to make a video. The kids are all big fans of Rachael Ray, so they loved the idea of creating their own cooking show.

This video turned out to be a family affair in the kitchen, which I think is appropriate for a project concerning a segment of Latin culture. I played sous chef while C1 was the cinematographer, C2 was in charge of taking stills, and DJ was the PA. We used the Digital Blue American Idol video cameras that I bought the kids for Christmas and ABM's cell phone (Treo 700p) for stills. I don't know anything about video editing, but C2 has been playing around with it for a little while so I think we may pull it off. If we totally mess up the video, we still have the stills that we can turn into a slide show with captions. Hopefully, M will get a good grade for this.

(BTW, I did not pay $79 each for those videocameras! I got mine for $14 each on eBay, and that included shipping.)

No comments: