Turn Yourself Into A Cartoon, Peanuts Character or Wild Self With These Fun Digital Tools & Tie Them Into Projects Too!

Everyone loves a little cartoon and animated fun!  And it is always fun when something special becomes available for all of us to use with our students and within education.  

This time it is a special free digital tool to celebrate The Peanuts Movie that opens soon.  

I have used Build Your Wild Self with students to create, inspire creativity and writing, and to create wonderful digital projects focused around literature and other topics. 

One year the kindergarteners and I used Build Your Wild Self when we were studying Eric Carle books to create themselves "all mixed up".  We used their creations in a collaborative Little Bird Tale digital story.   

You can read about this project here. 

The one for to celebrate The Peanuts Movie lets your students create their very own Peanuts character with Peanutizeme.com.

 They can select boy or girl...

 give their character special characteristics like hair, skin, eyes, expressions, clothes and more.

There are even several scenes that can be selected for the background including winter, playground, ice skating, and a school dance or hallway.

When they have created their character it can be downloaded as a Profile Picture or Wallpaper.

Just think how fun this would be to use with a creative writing project or collaborative classroom book focusing on the wonderful Peanut characters.

And how about a project and study of the art work of Charles Schultz and other cartoonists?  They would love this!

The Peanuts website is super cool too!  It is filled with so many things that would be fun to use along with a project.

It could be a project talking about characterization.  Each Peanuts character can be searched on the website.  They could even take on the role of a character and write a play or create one using a digital tool.

It would be fun to see the characters made out of clay or other materials and use a stop motion app to create a video.

Under the Kids page on the Peanuts site, coloring pages can be downloaded to color.  Once they are finished, they can be submitted to display on the website.

 There are two interactive games that can be played....Slide Blocks and Where's Woodstock.

Also, a gallery of greeting cards that can be sent electronically to anyone.   This website is so much fun and I just know you will love the information and fun they have included.

I wanted to include one more place to go to create cartoon looking images of your own.

PicMonkey is packed full of different Themes in the Editor tool.

With these Themes, you can take a photograph or anything you find or upload into the PicMonkey editor and add effects.

I added the Posterize Theme to this one of Hagan and I. 

I then added the Warhol Theme over the top.  It sure did make us look like we belonged in a comic book or graphic novel.

At the bottom of the Editor in PicMonkey, there are always special Themes.

This time of year you will find Halloween and Christmas Themes (check out how you can turn yourself into Santa or a Witch),

along with the ones they have available everyday such as Comic Print, Newsprint, Sketch, and Graphic Novel.

As you can see, there are many ways for our young people to make themselves into cartoons and other characters using digital tools.  The sky is the limit when connecting these creations into library, classroom and home projects and events.

Have fun trying these out and please share any that you love using too!