Animated videos are usually created by showing thousands of images very rapidly — which means they take a LONG time to make. But you can make a scene or story in just two drawings. We like to use this activity as a starting point before moving into more complex stop motion animation.
Materials
☐ Paper: printer paper works well for this activity.
☐ Drawing materials: like pens, pencils, colored pencils, and markers.
☐ Pencil (optional): you can use a pencil, mechanical pencil, skewer stick, or other long and thin rod to bring your animation to life.
Make Your Own Two Page Flipbook
Fold your paper in half lengthwise (hot dog style) and then cut along the fold line.
Take one of the lengths of paper you just cut. Fold it into half again to make a two page book.
Rotate it so that the folded side is at the top, and the open side is at the bottom, as shown on the left.
First, make a drawing on the bottom page to start telling your mini story. Think about repetitive and big motions, like opening and closing a mouth, lift things up and down, hammering, or dancing. Add an element of surprise by having something pop out, appear, or transform!
Next, make another drawing on the top page based on the drawing on the bottom page.
Tip: hold your paper over a window or screen to make tracing easier to make sure your images line up.
Bring your creation to life!
You can quickly flip the top page back and forth, or take your top page and wrap it around a pencil until it curls. Then move your pencil up and down quickly.
In partnership with Story Time with Mr. Limata, we’ve been testing out different tinkering activities with his 2nd grade class. Based on a great idea that Casey Federico suggested and inspired by Bea Rey's take on balance explorations shown below, we tried pairing building balancing sculptures with both imaginative drawing (drawing pictures of ideas and plans) and observational drawing (drawing to better understand what we’re looking at).
"Dibujar implica una segunda mirada sobre las propias creaciones, que da luz al que lo hace y al que lo recibe. Personalmente me ayuda a entender y ver, lo que realmente está ocurriendo delante mío." — Bea Rey
For background: we'd already established the difference between stacking objects on top of each other (left) and, to use the words of one student, "dangerous" balancing (right): building more precarious balancing sculptures on a point or seesaws with objects of very different weights.
This time, we showed the class 4 objects and then asked them to draw at least 2 different ways that they could either stack or "dangerously" balance them:
Then, we took a look at everyone's drawings. We asked about how they decided to arrange objects, listening to their reasoning and whether they thought their drawings were possible or impossible in the real world. We tried to create some of their drawings in the physical world to test them out:
The class then continued drawing imagined arrangements of objects, planning their future balancing sculptures with items from around their homes, or building and then documenting their own stacks and "dangerous" balance builds!
Carrot & Pea: An Unlikely Friendship is a sweet story about standing out and embracing differences — so probably not what you'd immediately think of as a book about science, technology, engineering and math. But as part of our work to create a Tinkering Library, we're seeking out books like this one as inspiration for hands-on tinkering activities because they both tell compelling stories and connect to STEAM concepts and processes in inspiring, and sometimes unexpected, ways.
The peas in the story slide down Colin the carrot, so in the past we've used the book to launch explorations of slopes, ramps, and rolling. Recently, we had the chance to build on this pairing and use Carrot & Pea to launch a broader set of hands-on builiding activities with second graders class over Zoom. Here's what we tried, in case you'd like to try it out too!
1. Read Carrot & Pea.
Read the book aloud to the group or take turns reading different pages. Pause to look closely at the illustrations of carrot acting as a tower, bridge, and slide (pictured here).
2. Collect a materials set.
Collect — or create — your materials set. To visually tie your builds back to the book, make your own Colin the carrot using cardboard, poster board, wood, or paper tower tubes and orange construction paper or markers. Find balls or limes to use as peas; we creatively misused these green "power popper" balls and transformed them into peas.
3. Build a tower, bridge, slide, or seesaw.
Construct a tower, bridge, slide, or seesaw. If you're building a tower, see how tall or how stable you can make your build. Think about how you can reuse the same materials in different configurations. How can you transform a paper towel tube into a bridge to transport balls from one place to another? Can your bridge become a ramp?
The story doesn't mention Colin acting as a seesaw, so we imagined our own version of what that might look like to tie in some explorations of balance and stability. Try placing a ball on a cup or yogurt container to keep it stable, and use it as a base for a seesaw.
All of the examples and quotes below are by 2nd grade students in Mr. Limata's class. Share back what you try too — we're still testing out how these kinds of book and hands-on activity combinations work in action.
Combine materials in surprising ways.
Try using balls, books, and planks
between tubes to build towers. How can
you make them more stable?
Add some personality!
"I drew on my pea because I got
inspired by you drawing on your
pea. And I drew a little smiling face
and then added some hair.”
Collect multiples of materials...
to support more complex constructions, like
this tower ramp. The class even coined the
term "slidge" for slides that are also bridges!
Invent connections.
One challenge that came up was how to
connect cardboard tubes together
to make longer ramps and tunnels.
Use everyday objects.
Many students took advantage of
household objects, like books and
boxes, in clever ways.
Ask for a description.
“So you put two tubes on the side of
your book, or desk, or kitchen table
and then you cut a tube in half...then
you put it on top of the tubes!”
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