3rd Grade Life Cycle Animations
Third graders at Holladay Elementary have been learning about animal life cycles in Science (SOL3.8b) and time in Math (SOL3.9), so today students in Ms. Pumphrey’s class created animated life cycles showing the time duration of each stage. First, they chose an animal and used the Internet to research the animal’s life cycle. I instructed them to focus on how long each stage lasted, and if they couldn’t find that information, they could used the microphone and ask Google (for example, “How long is the egg stage of a ladybug life cycle?”). We were surprised by how short and how long some of the stages lasted! Next, we went to BrushNinja, which is a free online animation tool, and illustrated our animal’s life cycle. We used the text tool to type how many days or months each stage lasted. Then we exported our animations as GIF files and shared them with our classmates in Schoology. You can see a few student samples here.