Why+Stop+Motion+Animation?

 The New Zealand Curriculum document of 2007 outlines five Key Competencies that it stated would be “…. capabilities for living and lifelong learning. They are the key to learning in every curriculum area.” (Ministry of Education, 2007) This new document gives all schools the freedom to emphasise whichever learning areas they choose, in order to engage their particular students in tasks specifically suited to them. It hopes to do away with the ‘one size fits all’ style of curriculum delivery. It aims to explore the links between the curriculum areas and lead to broader units of work. ‘(Schools) … may decide to organise their curriculum around central themes, integrating values, key competencies, knowledge, and skills across a number of learning areas.’ and ‘Wherever possible, schools should aim to design their curriculum so that learning crosses apparent boundaries.’ (Ministry of Education, 2007) In many ways this is a reprise of the work begun by Elwyn Richardson in his tiny rural school in the early sixties. http://www.networkonnet.co.nz/index.php?section=schools&id=9 http://leading-learning.blogspot.com/2005/05/in-early-world.html The Key Competencies are listed as: Thinking, Using language, symbols and texts, Managing self, Relating to others and Participating and contributing. As teachers, units of work we plan should contain as many of these as possible, along with integration of the differing learning areas. The resulting tasks should encourage the kind of ‘rich’ learning that we hope will engage students more successfully than has been the case in the past. What characterizes a ‘rich’ task? First, a rich task is designed to challenge the learner and intrigue them so they have an interest in completing it. Next, it must be appealing and challenging to students at any level while still offering them the chance of success. Rich tasks allow learners to complete them in various ways using imaginative and creative thought. They also encourage the learners to set their own course of study within the topic introduced and promote discussion and collaboration. Making a sequence using ‘Stop motion’ animation certainly fulfils all the criteria required of a rich task, but using animation as a longer term project, even a year, would allow the students to experiment, decide where they wished to take the idea and develop many more skills. Like Richardson’s pottery I think that animation of this type could lead to students covering most areas of the curriculum (with just a little direction). Animation is a very physical process, I have seen how it appeals to the ‘fidgits’ in my class. It grips their imagination and they can’t help but want to experiment further. Time constraints in a traditional class timetable make lengthy projects difficult to fit in, but if the animation were the only project it could hide a multitude of learning experiences that the students would not notice they were doing. Best of all, they would be real tasks that led to a tangible result. I think that the intention of the new revised Curriculum is to take opportunities such as this and run with them.
 * = =Why Stop Motion Animation?= ||
 * Rich tasks and Animations **
 * Rich tasks and Animations **
 * Rich tasks and Animations **
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