As part of their unit of enquiry on inventions, Mr Pfeiffer’s and Miss Dougherty’s year 2 classes have been making Claymation videos. These claymations show what life was like before and after a significant object was invented. The students chose inventions such as the bicycle, camera, car, catapult, clock, cotton gin, computer, internet, ladder, plane, radio, telephone & Wii.
As part of the planning process, the students created a storyboard where they wrote out four statements to tell their story and then drew pictures depicting life before and after the invention. They then made a stage and backdrop for their story from a shoebox and started to create the characters and objects for the story from plasticine. Filming the Claymation involved taking a photo, moving the characters and objects a little, taking another photo and so on. Parents and teachers helped with this process and took between 20 and 50 photos for each group of students.
Each group then visited me in my office where we prepared the Claymation video clip in Windows Live Movie Maker. The students chose their colour scheme, helped with some of the typing, read and recorded their story using Windows Sound Recorder and chose the background music.
Here are some of the final claymation videos (reduced in size for quicker viewing).