Golden Apple: Students Become Directors With Clay Animation

Lights, camera, action! Students at Menahga Public School are taking a seat in the director’s chair by creating clay animation videos.

This project helps students learn different ways animals obtain energy and different ways animals move.

“We’re doing this project instead so that they can show their understanding through a project instead of just filling out a test,” said Menahga Public School Science Teacher Elise Erickson.

This is one of the bigger projects of the year and student worked on it for a week.

“Each group is basically teaching about a different body system, so we want to make sure it’s fun, but that they’re also showing what they understand,” said Erickson. “They talked about the nervous system, the skeletal and the muscular system and then for obtaining energy they’re covering the circulatory system, respiratory system and then also the digestive system,”

Students were assigned tasks and responsibilities included bringing in pictures to create the scenes.

“We’re kind of rotating, so we can take picture or move the guy or else we’re making props for the clay person,” said Menahga Public School  Student Grace Howard.

The teams then chose what body systems they wanted to work on.

“So we’re just kind of making a scene about science so we have the nervous system,” said Howard. “So we have to explain in our story how the nervous system works.”

It wasn’t always easy. Trying to make the scenes work was quite challenging, but students figured it out.

“We usually use clay and we stick it on the clay and it stands it up for us,” said Menahga Public School Student Leeroy Kicker.

“My favorite part is probably just creating and modeling the whole scenes, watch it all come together and seeing how cool it is,” said Ethan Hendrickson, Menahga Public School student. “Once you take a bunch of pictures and see how all the animals moving and stuff.”

For the final scene students will present their stop motion videos during a film festival.