3rd Grade Life Cycle Animations
Third grade students in Ms. Dickey’s class at Davis Elementary have been learning about animal life cycles (SOL3.8). Animations are a great way to show life cycles (or any type of cycle) because each step can be illustrated and appear in sequence. Today I taught them how to make life cycle animations using Pixie and Keynote. First the students decided if they wanted to illustrate a frog or a butterfly life cycle. They used Pixie to illustrate the four stages then exported it as a PNG file (with transparency) so the background wouldn’t come through. Next we opened a Keynote template (that you can download by clicking here) and dragged our picture into the Keynote. We copied and pasted it three times and masked the picture so only one stage was showing for each picture. Looking back, we should have probably just drawn four separate Pixie pictures because masking was difficult for some students. After arranging their pictures in order, the students changed the them and added some transitions and builds using the Inspector. Finally they recorded their voices explaining each stage of the life cycle. Check out some of the students’ projects: Josie, Elena, Zoe, Owen, Isabella, and Alex (as you can see, most students picked the butterfly).