Bringing Our Kindergarteners Famous American Research Project To Life Using PebbleGo, Animation Drawings and Canva!

I love collaborating with our teachers on research projects.  It's one of the best parts of being a teacher librarian. 

A few weeks ago, my friend and colleague, Melanie Smith, one of our kindergarten teachers, asked me if I would bring together a few resources on a choice board where her students could pick a famous American to research.  

They would use PebbleGo Biographies for their research.  

To narrow it down for research focus, we created a choice board where they could choose from Athletes, Astronauts and Pilots, and Presidents and First Ladies. 

If you want to make a copy and add your own links to this choice board, you can make a copy here.

In PebbleGo, they are organized in these categories so I can grab the link to that section (as shown in the image above) to include in the choice board. This makes it easy to narrow the research focus. 

They used the PebbleGo articles as they research and created their projects. 

Working with a small group, they wrote a research report and drew a picture of their famous American. 

Melanie put them together on a black piece of construction paper and the kids wrote the name of their American with a white paint marker on the top. 

The kindergarteners did an amazing job! 

After they were finished with their projects, I took them to create an animated video project. 

To start, I went to Canva and selected Video. 

I love the Video tool within Canva. It is super easy to add title, 

information, and...

...the slides that contain our students projects. 

To create the slides that show their research projects, I took photos of the research projects and uploaded them into Canva.  I added each to a slide within the Video project. I also added a photo of the group and took out the background on the photo. 

This image shows where to find the Background Remover as you Edit any image. 

Once the background is removed, you can resize and move the image anywhere you'd like within the slide. 

I also found a background that related to the research and took the drawing of their famous American  animating it using...

...Animated Drawings. This cool new FREE digital tool brings children's drawings and art work to life, by animating characters to move!  

I took a screen shot from the photo of their research project and...

...uploaded it into Animated Drawings. 

Then go through the steps in Animated Drawings to work on animating the characters. 

Once you have the type of animation you want for the character, click on...

...Share at the bottom of the screen. 

You can download the video and then upload it...

...into Canva. You will add the video to the top of that slide with the background. The background can also be removed on a video with the Background Remover tool within Canva. 

I did this with each groups research project. 

Once it was complete, I shared the link with the teacher and students.  

You will find Mrs. Smith's amazing students and their Famous American research project here.