First graders in Ms. Long’s class at Davis Elementary have been learning about flowers and how they grow (SOL1.4) so today we made animations of growing flowers using ABCYa! Animate. I taught a similar lesson last year but I learned a couple of lessons since then. First, I learned a big lesson about modeling. I have found that if I draw a picture while modeling the steps in a process, the majority of students will end up copying my drawing. That’s what happened in my last lesson… almost all of the students’ flowers were red like mine. So this time I purposely drew an ugly grey flower that resembles Medusa. None of the children copied it. Also I learned how to make the animated GIF actually animate in the Google Doc (host the images on another site and link to the URL instead of importing them directly into the Google Doc and then link to the publicly shared Google Doc instead of the published web version). Finally, in order to keep the animations from moving too quickly, we pushed the Copy Cat button a few times for each picture so there were duplicates. You can see their finished projects here.
