Today 2nd grade students in Ms. Ambrose’s class at Holladay Elementary created simple Pixie animations to show addition and subtraction word problems that they made up themselves. First they went to the Stickers library and selected a certain number of whichever object they wanted. That was their beginning number, and they added the number using the stamp tool. Then I told them to come up with a word problem where they either added to or subtracted from that number. We discussed different actions that would cause their number to increase (buying new objects, getting more as a gift, finding more, etc) or decrease (losing objects, selling objects, giving them away, etc). So there was a lot of student choice involved because not only did they pick their object, they also decided whether to add or subtract, and what was the reason for the change. Some of them were very creative, and that’s exactly what you want! Next we duplicated the picture (for the animation effect) and either added or subtracted the stickers. They also used the stamp tool to complete the math sentence (example 5 – 2). Finally, we duplicated the picture one last time and they got a friend to solve the problem. They recorded their voices and added their photos for each step of the animation and exported them together as a video. You can see two student videos here: DJ & Devon.
