To celebrate the release of the DVD, an initative has been launched with schools and libraries in mind.
Aimed at 7-10 year olds, the initiative provides the opportunity to explore the themes of local legends and individuality through working with schools and libraries.
A complete, high calibre teaching solution (creative, exciting and fully integrated into the National Curriculum) for Year 5 & 6 teachers that seamlessly works ParaNorman into a week of cross-curricular lesson plans is available.
As is the opportunity to organise a complete library event that engages 7-10 year olds, encourages research and promotes ParaNorman. The event is linked to their local community and cements the place of the library within the children’s locality.
This is based around the idea of each community having its own local legends, ghost stories, folklore, oral history or unique characters. In the classroom children will research or create these (e.g. you could create a school legend of your own) using history, geography, creative writing, art and drama. In the library setting this will take the form of an event using local stories and history as a starting point, inviting local historians, museums, actors, writers in to take part.
Throughout the process, teachers and librarians will be using Norman’s tale as an example and using ParaNorman resources to illustrate their teaching/discussion points
Participating groups can then showcase their creative work (work that runs with the themes of ParaNorman) to Universal for a chance to win £1000 of media equipment (schools) and funding for a children’s reading area makeover (libraries). Suggested ways of doing this are creating an online album, writing a class ‘local’ newspaper, writing a play about their local legend, creating a mural, creating a storyboard or flick book for a stop-motion short story.
More information, and the opportunity to sign up can be found at www.paranormanmovie.co.uk
Resource packs will be mailed out to participating schools and libraries. These will include the following:
o Covering letter with hints, tips and a drive to online resources for the teacher or librarian
o Poster for classroom/event poster for library
o ParaNorman giveaways (stickers, bookmarks, postcards, masks)
o ParaNorman Local Legends Reporter’s Notebook – a fully branded 8pp notebook with space for children to write their findings, draw and map their discoveries. This will also include an incentive to purchase the DVD
To reduce printing costs, lesson plans will be made available online from 14th January.
The DVD is released on 28th January 2013.