Happy Holidays everyone! This week, we wanted to share a couple of cool projects that didn’t make it into our previous newsletters, as well as our favourite class projects from 2023.
Animated Elves 🎅🏽 with Jen
This was a fun and festive project Melissa did with her Grade 6 class just before the holidays. She had the students write a cover letter and resume as an Elf trying to get hired to work in “Santa’s Workshop”, and then draw what their Elves look like. Once they finished drawing, they took a picture of it and uploaded it to Animated Drawings, a website that animates your drawings. What a cute dancing elf!
If you want to do something similar in your class, you can always have your students animate anything else they draw - not just an elf! We’ve seen Grade 2 classes animate animals with specialized adaptations and Grade 4 classes add animated drawings to their character sketches.
Give the gift of inspiration 💡 and share the Classroom Chronicles with a fellow educator!
Avatars (Not the Blue Ones) 🥶 with Dylan
Every year, Natalie has her Grade 4 students create digital avatars using Pixton. The app is really great and has a cool feature that allows the whole class to take a class photo together with their avatars. Her students then get to use the avatars in their Seesaw Classroom and Google Classroom. A nice personal touch for their digital work.
Natalie wondered if, this year, she could take this project a bit further. Usually, creating avatars is just a fun project that gets them comfortable with the class Chromebooks. Natalie and I had just talked about animating in Canva, so I thought it might be cool to animate the avatar like a talking head explainer video. Chatterpix on the iPad is a quick and easy way to animate an image. Her students could breath some personality and life into these digital duplicates.
We started brainstorming a bit more…
What if we put the avatars in a project in Canva, we could just use the avatar in ALL their digital projects. What if the avatar became their signature? What if they turned their avatar into a sticker that could be used to personalize ANY digital project!? WHAT IF we printed the stickers and used them on physical projects too!?!?!?
Now we’re getting somewhere! We searched for sticker templates on Canva and found that there's lots to choose from. Hopefully, this will integrate nicely into their upcoming Entrepreneur project.
As an avid sticker collector, I can’t wait to stick some of these to the top of my Macbook.
Holiday Wrapping 🎁
We hope you all have a restful and relaxing holidays. We’ll be back in the New Year with more content for your inbox. For now, we’ll leave you with some of our favourite projects from this school year.
Happy Holidays from the Classmate Team! 🙌
Jon
Last week I met with a Teacher Librarian, Jen, about the idea of a Newsletter Club. The idea of the club came about when a bunch of her students approached her with the desire to create a school newspaper.
JonThis week, a story of how nature and tech can create a unique outdoor learning experience for kindergarteners. Anticipation and looming rain clouds were in the air as we prepared for our field trip with Ms. Gabrielle’s Kindergarteners.
JonAn awesome project in September!? What a fun time in Diane's class! It's only the third week of September, but believe it or not, I've been able to be a part of this classroom project since my first visit of the year.