Third graders at Laburnum Elementary have been studying animal life cycles (SOL3.8b), so today students in Ms. Collins’ class created animated insect life cycles using ABCYa! Animate. We picked insects because many students are very familiar with the butterfly life cycle, but they are not familiar with other insects’ life cycles. First we did some research. The students picked an insect they were curious about (ants, fireflies, mosquitoes, cockroaches, ladybugs, etc) and searched for a life cycle diagram for that specific insect. Next they searched for photographs of each stage in the insect’s life cycle to see what they really looked like. Students were amazed at how bugs looked so different in their larva stages! When our research was finished, I posted the link to ABCYa! Animate on Google classroom. On the first frame of the animation I showed them how to draw a picture of the insect’s eggs and label it “eggs”. We used the copy cat button to copy the picture, and then we added an arrow to it. We copied that picture and added the “larva” stage. We continued copying each picture and adding stages to the life cycle until it was complete. Then we adjusted the speed of our animation and exported it as a .gif file. Finally, we uploaded our animations to Google classroom so everyone could see them. You can see them all here.
