Multimedia Review- Curious George Goes to the Hospital

Credit: Better World Books

As a long-time fan of Curious George, determining the subject of my multimedia review was simple: Curious George would naturally be my star, and my favorite book of the series, Curious George Goes to the Hospital would be the featured media. The difficult part was figuring out whether or not to do a book chat, a reading, or a trailer. Given that the book would take several minutes to read aloud, I knew that a reading was not an option. I then narrowed my options to either a book chat or a trailer. Given my target audience, however, I determined that a trailer would be the most effective method of promoting the book.

Before starting my project, I considered the advice given in this video, and decided to leave a bit of mystery. I also spoke with a few parents of children aged four, five, and six, who supported the idea of not giving away all of the details, thereby encouraging children to want to read the book on their own. This was achieved by giving a three minute summary of the book, and throughout the trailer, asking children to make predictions about certain events, such as what George ate to make his belly hurt, what puppet he played with, and what the nurse gave him before going home after his operation.

So as to keep the children engaged throughout the presentation, I kept the slide transitions very short to give the effect of constant speech. Additionally, I limited the length of the teaser/trailer to the length of a single song so that children would not become bored due to lack of fast-paced motion, and begin to fidget or walk away.

Credit: Money in Stereo

Once I had completed my video, I visited the advice  of the Media Education Lab at the University of Rhode Island, to test my piece with my target audience. To do so, I asked parents and children to watch the video. Some of the parents and children I knew, and some I connected with via my personal Twitter account. In every case, the feedback was positive, indicating that the children responded to the questions, remained still for the length of the video, and were enthusiastic about reading the full book. Parents noted that the video was age-appropriate, engaging, and presented in a format that was not overpowering. From this feedback, I made only minor edits to my video, and determined it ready for uploading.

While the process of creating this video was very time consuming, it was a lot of fun. I’ve made the video available for public viewing with the hope that it will inspire parents and children to read a book that I hold close to my heart. Additionally, hopefully it will inspire others to create similarly-formatted videos as a method of getting children excited about reading. I am very happy with my output, and credit this video for the idea to leave children guessing so as to keep them engaged after the limited time that you have with them.

I hope you enjoy watching the video as much as I loved making it!

Stay Curious!