Today fourth graders in Ms. Bennett’s class at Davis Elementary made animations of the moon phases using Flipbook (SOL4.8). I tried this lesson earlier with another class, but I had neglected to do my research ahead of time, and we got a lot of things wrong. Like did you know that the moon moves counterclockwise around the Earth (unless you’re looking at it from below)? But that shows that making animations requires a deeper understanding of processes than you would normally need to have. To give another example, I tried to make an animation of a power plant for the Virginia Trekkers based on my research (which I did do), but when I sent it to the director of the power plant to check it over, he pointed out several mistakes. It took many revisions and a lot more research, and through it all, my understanding of the process greatly improved. The point is, making animations is a valuable learning activity, even if it takes a bit of extra time. And it does take time. We didn’t get to finish our animations today, but they still turned out pretty good. The students illustrated where the moon is located at different phases and how it appears to us on Earth. You can see all the animations here.
