Animate & Research The Presidents For Presidents Day!

 

It's Presidents Day on February 20, 2023. Our students have been learning all about the Presidents through books, eBooks, 

PebbleGo and PebbleGo Next, videos and other creative projects and experiences. 

When my friend and 2nd grade teacher, Tracy Ferguson, told me her students wrote Presidential Research Reports highlighting text and graphic features, I knew the perfect little digital tool to add on to this project.

It's called Animated Drawings. 

In this cool animation tool, you can upload drawings to animate. Please note that this is a teacher tool, not a student tool.  

The first thing we did was have the students color a picture of the President they researched. 

Next, I scanned the pictures on our office copier and uploaded them one by one into Animated Drawings. Once you have it uploaded, just click on Next.  This tool does a great job of promoting you through the creation process. 

It will find the character. You can move the frame around to make sure you have the entire character but not a lot of extra space around it. 

You can also take these little drawing tools and fix things that didn't quite scan as well.  I fixed up the hand super quick and I know that will make a big difference for Wesley when he sees Abraham Lincoln carrying his torch. 

I love this step...finding character joints!  You can also move those around if you want more or less. 

And there you have it!  Our very first animated character! 

As you add this animation, you can give it different motions like dance moves or walking moves. 

Once you are finished, you can share. 

Animated Drawings provides various social networks to share, email and download. I used two different ways to share their animated President. 

First, I grabbed the page link and created a QR code using QRCode Monkey. 

I used the picture of the character and made sure to include the banner they created at the top of their picture.  This will help identify the QR codes easily. 

I also clicked on the download button because I am going to take this video and use it in Canva. 

In Canva, I am going to create a little movie of Mrs. Ferguson's 2nd graders with their projects. 

This will be a fun way to showcase each student and their animated President.  I will share more directions on how to do this in Canva in an upcoming blog post once we are all done. 

Tracy will be displaying their Presidential Research Reports and Animations for conferences.  

The QR code will be attached so families can scan it and see their animated President. 

What a fun way to celebrate Presidents Day!