Kindergarteners and 1st graders at Holladay have been learning all about plants and flowers and how they grow in the spring (SOL K.9 & 1.4). So today I tried two different ways to create animations with them. In Kindergarten we used a site called ArtPad. It records the painting process from start to end, so students painted their flowers in the order they grow: first the seeds, then the roots, stem, leaves, and flower. We also labeled the parts. When you click on the students’ pictures, you can see the animation and it looks like the flower is growing! You can also speed it up or slow it down. Check them out by clicking here. In first grade we used a site called ABCYa! Animate. It was a bit more complicated because it was a frame-by-frame animation. The nice thing about this website though is that you can duplicate frames (pictures) so the students don’t need to draw them over each time. First we drew the background with the things plants need (soil, sky, sun), then on each picture we added the different steps: a seed falling into the soil, roots growing out of it, then a stem, leaves, and finally the flower. We also labeled the parts. You can see all their animations by clicking here.