My friend, George, is up to something interesting again (last year, it was the inspiring Many Voices for Darfur project) and it reminds me that what goes around, comes around. Last year, George asked about integrating stop-motion animation in the classroom as my class was engaged in claymation projects. Now, he has a group of kids calling themselves The Longfellow Ten who are creating and producing stopmotion films around literary terms. And he asked if my students might be interested in joining his students, and possibly others, in building up a site of short stop-motion films on certain themes (George, can we do Math in the spring?).
I looked at my schedule, cleared out a few things and today, I began working with all four of my classes on stopmotion movies. I just let them play today and they had a blast, using the freeware (StopMotion Animator) and webcams and a few even made it into Moviemaker to start messing with titles. Tomorrow, we move on to the real lesson. They will be working in small groups to develop a short movie on a literary theme that is part of our curriculum:
Antagonist
Protagonist
Foreshadowing
Dialogue
Setting
First Person Point of View
Third Person Point of View
Plot
Characterization
Fiction
Non-Fiction
Here is a picture of them at “work” today.
And here is a little movie that I made with one of the classes to show how it is done.
More to come in the future …
Peace (frame by frame),
Kevin