3rd Grade Animal Research Projects
One of the major research projects in 3rd grade is the Animal Report. Students choose an animal, think of questions they have about that animal, then go to the library and find information about its habitat, eating habits, predators, and other interesting facts. Once they have gathered their information, they must present it to their classmates in an interesting way. Of course, using technology is a great way to present their reports, and there are many exciting options for students to chose from. You can find many ideas on my blog here, here, here, here, and here. But today the students could chose between making an animated video or a Comic Life ebook. For the animated video, students drew a picture of their animal in Pixie, exported it as a PNG file (with transparency), and then brought it into Keynote. In Keynote, they added a picture of the animal’s habitat from an Internet search, then used one of the animated builds to make the animal move into its habitat. They also recorded a narration explaining the important facts about their animal. You can see a sample student video here. For the Comic Life ebook the students gathered their own animal/habitat pictures from the Internet and used them to create a comic in the Comic Life program. Then they added information using the speech bubbles. I combined them together into one PDF so we could publish it as an ebook using FlipSnack. You can see the student sample here.