Meet Joe Summerhays:

Did you catch what it is that Mr. Summerhays does for a living? As early as fourth grade, he is teaching children throughout New York to become movie makers! I was privileged to meet Mr. Summerhays in a much less noisy venue several months ago. It was actually in the quiet of a church hallway after our Sunday services had concluded. My brother, who was a member of the same congregation, asked if he would take a moment to talk with me about his work in teaching children to become film makers.

What Mr. Summerhays understood was the same thing that my high-school history teacher understood: that film making is an effective way to teach children almost anything.

So what has Mr. Summerhays had influence over? Here’s a couple of samples (but this is only scratching the surface). Keep in mind that these are the kids making the films:

There’s one other video of his that I would like to share, but it merits a blog post in and of itself. So we’ll get to that another day. I’ll add a link here when it’s been posted.