2nd Grade American Indian Math Animations
Second graders at Davis Elementary have been learning about subtraction in Math (SOL2.7), and they’ve been studying American Indians in Social Studies (SOL2.2). Today students in Ms. Becker’s class created American Indian math animations. First we opened Pixie, and I instructed them to chose the Powhatan, Lakota, or Pueblo Indian tribe to illustrate. We discussed how to paint the environment for each tribe: the Powhatan lived in the woods, the Lakota lived on the plains, and the Pueblo lived in the desert. After the students painted the background, we went to stickers, and I showed them where the American Indian stickers were located. They added images of the Indians, their homes, plants, and animals. Since they were creating a subtraction problem, they had to copy and paste one of the stickers multiple times for the initial number (for example, 14 buffalo, 12 canoes, 18 pots). The students added a text box and wrote a sentence like, “The Lakota Indians saw 14 buffalo.” Next the students clicked File > Duplicate to make a copy of the picture, and they typed a sentence telling how many were subtracted. They also deleted the corresponding number of stickers. We exported the two pictures as JPG files, then went to Gickr and uploaded the image files. Gickr turns still photos into an animated GIF file. Once the GIF files had been created and downloaded, students uploaded them to Google classroom for their classmates to solve. You can see them all here.