Day 5: Paper Plants, Terrariums, & Stop Motion Animation

This day was fairly laid back as it was mostly a continuation of the previous day’s lesson. The night before I had baked their dinosaur eggs in the oven so they would dry faster and be ready for handling the next day.

I started out by showing the students a PowerPoint about the Cretaceous-Paleogene Extinction Event and the art of stop motion animation. We even watched a ten minute stop motion video made by Iowa City 2-6^th graders: The Robot and the Butterfly.

Originally I hadn’t intended for their paper plants and dinosaur nests to be part of the stop motion animation lesson, but I realized that the paper plants would introduce them seamlessly to the idea of creating background scenery and props for the videos they were going to be making. We watched a demonstration of the stop motion software they would be using and I assigned them into groups for making their videos, instructing them to finish their plants first and work on scenery and script in their groups after.

After gathering all their own painted papers (which we had labeled with their names or initials on the back the day before), I showed them a demonstration of how to trace and cut their leaves out of the paper, how to use wire and frog tape to construct their leaves, then how to use wire and tape to construct their stems and make a multi-stemmed, multi-leaved paper plant.

As each student finished their plants, I super glued moss from the craft store onto a Styrofoam base and they stuck their wire plants in the foam. They could then arrange their eggs around it and have a complete nest.

As they worked on their plants they discussed what they wanted their movie to be about. With one group of three girls, the girl who finished her nest first acted as secretary for her group and wrote down their setting, characters, and plot ideas as the rest worked.

One group of two boys had a bit of a harder time staying on track with their plants, and also later with the script. They didn’t want to write a long script, they whipped up something fast for their scenery, and weren’t much interested in putting forth more effort when I prodded. They immediately wanted to get to the animation. I told them that working with the software was going to be put off until the next class because all the preparation work they were doing now was very important.  Eventually they put more work into their scenery and script and finished their nests.

At the end of class, we took a break from fake plants and used *real* plants to make an awesome dinosaur terrarium.

Everyone was very excited for Monday to start animating their videos.