SMS students telling tales

Editor’s note: This is the fifth in a series of articles focused on some of the new electives at Sandpoint Middle School that give seventh- and eighth-grade students a jump-start in learning hands-on skills. This article takes a look into the middle school’s morning news crew and how they create the segments aired each day throughout the school. The next and final story in the series will look at an old, unused hallway that now bustles with activity in the mornings since it was remodeled for the new advanced fitness elective.

By MARY MALONE

Staff writer

SANDPOINT — Reporters come in all shapes and sizes, and with this year's new electives, Sandpoint Middle School students are proving they have what it takes to deliver the news. 

"A majority of the kids come into the classroom and immediately tell me, 'I don't want to be on camera,'" said Kari Granier, SMS yearbook, morning news and student leadership teacher. "By the end they are fighting over who gets to be the anchor that week, and kids who didn't want to be on are begging to be on (camera)."

After getting their assignments and a little advice from the teacher Tuesday, four groups of seventh-grade students rushed to record footage for Wednesday's morning newscast before deadline, which was, of course, the end of the class period.

Because the newscast they were working on would air March 1, basketball was a common theme among the segments for March Madness. On the task of the Pledge of Allegiance and trivia segments, Karli Hamilton and Amara Larkin ran off to get a flag photo before heading to the gym for filming. The trivia question for the day: Who holds the most NCAA national championships?

Other groups filmed the opening and closing segments, lunch and weather announcements, and another group took care of any other announcements, such as inviting students to Friday's March Madness dance and announcing the girls basketball pizza party.

Tiffany Brown added a little bit of emphasis to the events by shooting a hoop while Tanner Thornhill recorded it all. Even the lunch announcements get spiced up with jokes like, "What do you call a chicken looking at a salad? Chicken sees-a salad" — Wednesday's lunch was actually chicken taco salad, not chicken caesar, but close enough. 

"When you are saying the announcements it's not the boring, same old stuff," Tiffany said. "You can make it your own words and personalize it."

Jada South, Phoenix Piper and Amber Lundquist said they enjoy doing the opening and closing segments, which include introducing the videos, interviewing people and "playing around" with the greenscreen.

"For the closing we will do something funny like jump in the snow or something," the girls said. "We mess up a lot, too. It takes us a couple tries."

Since not all students enjoy being in front of the camera, they have plenty of opportunities in other areas, including recording and editing. Benicio Ramirez was editing the newscast toward the end of the class period Tuesday and enjoys taking on the task.

"I think it's fun — all of the different effects we can with do with it," Benicio said.

Granier said this is the second year she has taught yearbook, and decided to start the morning news this year to highlight students and events throughout the year, including sports, music, honor roll students and more.

"You can kind of celebrate student life as it's happening, instead of waiting until the end of the year when the students have forgotten," Granier said.

They also include other classes in the school as often as they can, like last semester's news crew who used clips from Dinah Gaddie's class when the students built and flew drones. Granier said the homeroom classes submitted their own videos to the news crew when they took on the mannequin challenge, and the class edited them into a segment.

She said the purpose of the class is to give the students more exposure to technology and let them go out on their own and use the technology and play around with it. To have an audience to expose their work to, she said, makes it more important and purposeful to the students.

While she does give them some tips, the newscasts are entirely student-led, Granier said. It is their ideas that drive where the class goes next, she said, and as if on cue, Amber came by and suggested doing an April Fools' Day special next month. Granier said they do specials on occasion and thought it was a great idea.

"They get to go out on their own, they are in charge of their own ideas, and they come back and they execute their own ideas," Granier said.

Mary Malone can be reached by email at mmalone@bonnercountydailybee.com and follow her on Twitter @MaryDailyBee.