Have your students experienced (read) The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore’s book on the iPad? The interactive experience of reading, hearing, and activating animations engages the reader. The book’s Universal Design for Learning (UDL) nature is evident in this new style of publishing.

This Moonbot Studios-produced book demonstrates how a good story combined with animation and reader interactivity moves book publishing beyond text and illustrations.

Looking to use animated books in the classroom, how might we expand the learning beyond the benefits of immersive reading? How can we help our students be designers working to connect their words to potential animations?

While students still need to get the tools to animate aspects of their stories quickly, they can imagine and think beyond the one-dimensional nature of pencil and paper illustrations. One could help students further develop their creative writing stories by having them think as designers needing to explain and visualize how they want an animator to create movements and actions for their scenes. Students could compile a list of animations and then storyboard them for each scene.

There are many ways to proceed with this learning activity. While I am not a language arts teacher, here are some ideas that might be helpful. After introducing the idea of an animated story, one could have the students write their creative story and storyboard animations without reading The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. This would be a challenge for some while leaving it wide open for the more divergent thinkers when they are challenged to design animations for their stories.

One could also have the students write their story and then read the animated book to unleash their imaginations prompted by the animations. Have the students work individually to think of possible animations or have the class brainstorm a listing to prime the pump for the students to draw from. I would like to see how students then might go back and change their stories to make them more vivid to better connect to their animations.

Another approach might be to start with Mr. Morris Lessmore to give the students even more guidance, having them think with movements and other animations in mind before they write their stories.

One might naturally differentiate the lesson by using all three approaches for different learning needs in the class.

Storyboarding comes into play as students use either pen and paper or an app on the iPad or software on the computer to sketch out what each scene will look like and what animations they want the animator to create. Design literacy would be essential as students must explain how their animations support each story segment. In other words, the students working as authors and designers must demonstrate how each animation improves the story. Flying objects and exploding characters might be fun and exciting to an eleven-year-old author. Still, unless an animation improves the story, it doesn’t get published in the final storyboard.

Partnering up the students to offer one another feedback would be helpful, especially with a rubric that also provides questions to ask one’s partner to help connect the animations to improve the story.

There are many opportunities for learning with this type of project-based learning activity that also helps students make their thinking visible. This project brings many fantastic learning opportunities with video production, though the students stay within the storyboarding stage. The Information and Communications Literacies (ICL) also connects with the student’s need to use sound design in constructing their storyboards as if they were communicating with a professional animator.

 

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