Ms. Robinson’s 3rd graders at Laburnum Elementary have been learning about the simple phases of the moon (SOL3.8). In a previous post I showed how we used Flipbook to make animations of the moon’s movements and phases in a 4th grade class. It worked well for them, but third graders only study the simple phases (new, 1st quarter, full, and 3rd quarter) so I wanted to try something different. Flipbook doesn’t have a text feature, and I thought it would be easier and neater for the students to type the names of the phases, so we used ABCYa! Animate. First we discussed how the moon moves around the Earth and how, even though the sun was always shining on it from the same direction, it looks like different parts are illuminated from our viewpoint here on Earth. That’s important for them to understand because as we draw the moon going around the Earth in our animation, it will look the same (half light, half dark). So I explained that we will also need to add an animation of how the moon appears from Earth up in the corner. Once the students understood what they would need to draw, they began their animations. They were grouped with a partner so they could take turns drawing each frame. They used the circle tool to draw the Earth, sun, and moon. Then they used the drawing tool to add the details. We copied each picture using the Copy Cat button and then moved the moon and adjusted the phase image for each one. The students also typed a complete sentence (with capitals, periods, and correct spelling) identifying each phase of the moon. Take a look at a couple of examples: Marthaline & Keon, Joseph & Kimberleigh (the jittering on certain frames happened when we tried duplicating frames to slow down the animation).