Thursday, May 27, 2010
4th Grade Flip Books
As an introduction to animation and the concepts used with the 5th grade claymation project, 4th graders learned how to make flip books this year. Each student came up with something simple to animate. Flip books were at least 25 pages and many even included full color. This was a fun project and a great learning experience!
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Do you have any words of wisdom who is going to attempt to make flip books with their students? Yours looked great!
I had my students (4th grade) do a smaller practice book first after seeing some examples from YouTube. The biggest problem I came across was cutting paper so it was small enough to use for a flip book, but also getting it to be exactly the same size using my big paper cutter. I ended up using a three hole punch to make two holes in each page. The kids worked on their book (back to front) and then bound it together with yarn when they were finished. This was the first time I had done flip books, so I'm going to try to improve on my methods this year. Let me know if you come up with any better ways of making them. I know that using post-it pads works quite well, but I didn't want to spend the money to buy 100 of them. Good luck!
Thanks for the helpful hints... I think we're going to use index cards (hopefully they won't be too thick to flip...) But we'll start next week, so hopefully the kids will understand the concept of a flip book.
Using index cards is a great idea. Let me know if they flip through OK. I found that my kids picked up on the concept pretty quickly. I did examples that seemed to get the point across.
One that I forgot to mention is that I had my kids start with a pretty simple animation. If the main part of the animation was going to be somebody throwing a ball, I had them draw each page of the animation first. If they finished that, I encouraged students to add background details and eventually color if they had time.
I came to leave comment on how awesome your flip books are. I LOVE the skateboarder, and the idea of video! Brought back memories of my son--he animated ALL corners of high school textbooks, which I'm sure was a no-no, but very entertaining.
I'll share something I learned from a 7th grader. (I actually found this on the art room floor. He apparently made it, and animated it, on the fly while he was "supposed" to be doing something else). After carefully scrutinizing his work, here's what I figured out. First, make a fold on the edge of a stack of about 6 pieces of copy paper (about 1 1/2" - 2" from the edge). He made two snips with the scissors to free a little booklet. If you do this twice you have 24 pages. He stacked the booklets (about matchbook size). He stapled three times to bind it together. Now here's the key. He used his scissors to cut the three open sides of the book after they were stapled. The scissors make a slightly tapered cut that worked wonderfully for thumbing the pages.
Kid Culture--ya gotta love it!
I wouldn't use index cards. Won't be able to see through or flip easily. I am going to ask my students to bring in their own post-its. Work towards the bottom. Keep it simple. High school can morph easily (too easily), but story lines can be lame. Discuss pro's and con's. Be clear about numbers of pages otherwise quality will be questionable. Good luck to all of us!
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