BUTTE – “Goodbye, Whittier Wildcats. hope you have a great day, see you again tomorrow. Gooooo Wildcats! Peace,” the Whittier students shout into the camera.
Whittier Elementary school students have taken the humdrum morning announcements and taken them to a higher level. They’ve turned it into their very own television broadcast that gets played every morning to the entire school.
“We just tell kids in the school all the way from Kindergarten to the sixth grade what’s going on. We have weather people, interviews,” said sixth grader Ella Collins.
Teacher K.B. Kennis, who is the school’s technology teacher, oversees the WBC, or Wildcats Broadcasting Company, and each week a different team of sixth graders puts on the show.
“We learn a lot of responsibility because we have to be here every single morning to make sure all sounds correctly, film everything and everyone has to put their part in to get the broadcast together,” Collins explained.
Kennis was one of five teachers in Butte this week to receive a $1,000 grant from the Colt Anderson Dream Big Foundation for her work in this unique program. She said the grant will help purchase more equipment.
“We started off with two iPads, and now we’re up to six iPads, so we’re getting bigger and it’s going forward,” said Kennis.
Each day these kids get here well before class to prepare for the broadcast. They even create a storyboard which has everything from what’s for lunch, the word of the day and even the weather.
“They learn how to film, they learn how to edit, they learn how to work together, which is important also,” said Kennis.
Having fun while they learn. Anyone can watch these broadcasts on YouTube.
Reporting by John Emeigh for MTN News
