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Amy Clark
1st Grade Teacher
LaRue Miller Elementary School
Midlothian ISD |
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I was first introduced to clay animation through our technology coordinator, Angela Allen. I was so excited to see what my 1st grade children could do with the program! We started off by retelling the story of Little Red Riding Hood and from there, our clay animation experiences grew. To support our math learning, we worked together to make a counting book about the monsters in our room. My students really responded to clay animation and were willing to work hard and take risks. Then, Angela showed me Twist. Here is her story... "Several years ago, I shared Twist with my good friend Amy Clark. She fell in love. Well, that is an understatement. She went absolutely crazy with this program. She was obsessed with creating illustrations with Twist. We went to bookstores and bought drawing books; she would see pictures in restaurants and would then try to recreate them in Twist. It was crazy!
Then she told me that she was using Twist with her first graders. I told her first graders weren’t ready for a vector-drawing program. She disagreed and sent me some of the projects her students created with Twist. I was impressed, but still not convinced. Then, I visited her classroom… When I walked into the computer lab, each student was working on a drawing in Twist. The atmosphere was full of energy. Watching these kids work with Twist was incredible, to say the least. Not only were they drawing in this program but they were right clicking and sending images to the back, grouping, ungrouping, etc. They were using skills that older students struggle with. This classroom was in a poor, urban community. It was a predominately minority classroom. These students were far from being gifted. In fact, my friend had her hands full this year with this group of kids!" --Angela Allen After Angela introduced me to Frames, we started using Twist to design the frames for our animation. Now with drawing tools built into Frames, my students can make their animations even more quickly. In a recent first grade unit on the history of America and its development, we used biographies to learn more about people and events. Each day we would focus on a different person, or group of people, from American history. After reading, students wrote down three things they learned. Then, they drew pictures to represent each thing. Some students began drawing on the computer, and others began on paper before moving to the computer. I collected drawings from each topic and we began animating our movie. We added the art, duplicated frames, and rearranged the pictures on them to create movement. Students who preferred writing over drawing narrated their writing into the microphone. All of the words and facts they used are what they remembered from the reading of the biography. The result was an amazing History of America video created by first graders! |
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