The phases of the moon give us a beautiful calendar in the sky, but sometimes that calendar is difficult to read. Is the first quarter when the right or left side is lit up? Is the moon waxing or waning? Answering these questions takes a bit of perspective, and that’s why animation is an excellent way to broaden students’ understanding of these processes, especially if the students create the animation themselves. Third graders at Varina Elementary used ABCYa! Animate to create animated .gifs of four moon phases: (1) new moon, (2) first quarter, (3) full moon, and (4) last quarter (SOL3.8a). In order to be accurate, the students had to do some research. They had to find out which direction the moon orbits the Earth and what the moon looks like from Earth at different positions. Once they had their facts, they illustrated the position of the Sun, Earth, and moon for each phase, showing what we see from our perspective here on Earth. Next they exported the four images as one animated .gif file. Then they posted their animations to Google classroom with a question for their classmates to answer. After watching each other’s animations and answering each other’s questions, these third graders have a much clearer understanding of how the moon phases happen and the order in which they occur. This was actually submitted as an H21 lesson, which means you can download the lesson plan here. Student samples: Layla Obey and Erin Hardin.

Fourth graders at Varina Elementary have been learning about electricity and circuits (SOL4.3), so today students in Ms. Burcham’s class created animated circuits. First we discussed the parts of a circuit. To keep things simple for the amount of time we had, we limited our circuits to a power source for generating electricity (battery) and an object that converts the electrical energy into light, sound, heat, or motion. We left off the switch, but students could easily create other animations in the future with switches and additional parts. I posted a link to ABCYa!Animate on Google Classroom, and the first object we drew was the power source. I showed them how to use the shapes tool to draw a simple battery. We discussed the positive and negative end (the positive end is the part with the knob) and which direction the current would flow out of the battery so our animations would be accurate. When one student said it flows from positive to negative and another said it flows the opposite way, I said that they both were right, in a sense. The actual flow of electrons is from the negative end to the positive end, but when Benjamin Franklin and other early scientists wrote about electricity, before the electron had been discovered, they said that the flow was from the positive to the negative end. So that “current” was called “conventional current” because it was based on convention, or tradition. Many circuit diagrams show the flow of electricity according to convention, or from positive to negative, so that’s the way we showed it today. I also related it back to their force and motion unit (SOL4.2) by asking whether a battery has potential or kinetic energy. They were correct in stating that it has potential energy. Any resistor on the circuit, like a light bulb, slowed the flow of electrons due to friction. So now that their concepts were correct, they could draw the rest of the diagram. We drew the wire, making sure it connected to both ends of the battery so the electricity could flow, and we drew an object to be powered by the battery along the route of the wire. For each frame we represented the current by yellow dots along the wire. When the dots reached the object, we made it do something, like turn on or move. Then we continued the dots back to the battery. When we finished our animations, we exported them as GIF files and uploaded them to Google classroom with a question for our classmates to answer. You can see them all here (bonus if you can find the battery with no potential energy).