“They would do it every minute of every day,” said Royal Road Elementary School Grade 3 and 4 Teacher Katherine Lister-Clark, “and they can’t wait to do another one.”
The “it” Lister-Clark describes is stop motion animation, a fun teaching tool students at Royal Road Elementary have been using this semester to both create movies and reinforce their knowledge in other subject areas.
“I was talking to [ASD-W Digital Learning Lead] Mr. [Jeff] Whipple about him coming into my class to do an activity with them where they could use technology and learn some new skills, and he came up with stop motion,” said Clark. “So we got inspired!”
For the past 10 years, Whipple has been supporting district teachers looking for technology-intensive learning opportunities for their pupils. Teachers come to him with a rough idea of what they want to teach students, and Whipple works with them to develop fun, engaging, technology-based activities that both teach and entertain.
“Stop motion provides a variety of learning opportunities and can be adapted across a variety of subject areas and grade levels,” said Whipple. “Whether it is clay, Lego, felt, or computer-generated animation, it builds on art and design concepts, writing and speaking, planning, etc.”
You may be familiar with the stop motion style of animation from holiday classic movies like Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer and The Year Without A Santa Claus, or from modern films like Chicken Run and the Wallace and Gromit series.
“What is stop motion animation?: Stop motion animation is an advanced flipbook-style form of animation. It involves photographing and then physically manipulating objects within your frame. As each frame is played in sequence, the technique creates the effect of an object moving itself.”
Adobe: Stop motion animation explained: definition, types and techniques
“It was fun to watch how invested they were, and excited [because] it touches on so many curriculum outcomes too,” said Lister Clark.
Students created claymation-style stop motion animations using only primary coloured clay: cyan, magenta, and yellow. To get other colours they wanted, they had to mix their clay, which taught them colour theory.
They honed their literacy skills by devising storylines and writing scripts for their characters. And they reinforced their mathematics knowledge “because every five pictures was one second. So if they wanted [a scene] to be 10 seconds long, they had to figure out how many pictures they needed,” she said. “It has a lot of outcomes so I thought it was very worthwhile.”
Though the project was fun, it was also definitely a learning activity. Students had to focus.
Grade 3 student Dane Slade enjoyed creating his characters the most. “There was a snake, there was a jaguar, two monkeys, and a bird that stole the bananas,” said Slade, “but it was hard.”
Another Grade 4 student, Allison Sheehan, took the opportunity to learn a bit more about her classmates while creating a movie with a message.
“My project is about the Ugly Duckling… the point is that no one should be mistreated no matter how they look,” said Sheehan, adding, “I really liked getting to know my other classmates and what their opinions were.”
District students can expect more innovative, technology-based projects, said Whipple, as his Digital Learning Team explores such activities as expanded video production, coding, robotics, MineCraft and more.
“In the end, the teacher drives the learning, our role is to support in whatever way we can,” he said.