Claymation

This school year was full of new opportunities for me. I went from teaching 3rd grade to teaching character education and digital citizenship. I really enjoyed integrating some neat technology in my lessons. One of our final projects was to create claymation videos to teach about digital citizenship.

My students wrote a short script and then started the animation. I was fortunate to receive the supplies needed from Oriental Trading in exchange for my honest review.  I used Crayola modeling clay so that clay creations did not dry out. Then I got clay shape cutters to help the students with the process of creating.

We watch several how to tutorials from YouTube and learned about the history of claymation and stop motion. The students loved Art Clokey and Gumby! This project involved a lot of creating and it was neat to see the student's imagination come to life. 

The videos that the students made were short because animating each change is a bunch of work. Some students amazed me with how much they were able to do. We used our iPads to create this project in iMovie. We took still shots and edited them to be 0.4 seconds long. Then we added voice and sound effects. 

The Crayola modeling clay and the clay cutters from Oriental Trading really helped make this project a success! The clay which is only slightly worse for wear (after two hundred students using it a day for two weeks) will be able to be stored and used next school year! Now for my example stop motion claymation debut: