What Is Stop-motion?

Stop motion is an animation technique to make physically manipulated objects appear to move on their own through the process of the camera being repeatedly stopped and started and slightly moving the object. 

How Can Stop-motion Be Used In A Classroom? 

Being able to create stop-motion videos can be utilized in many different ways in the classroom. Here are five different ideas I came up with on ways you can use stop-motion with your students.

  1. It promotes patience and storytelling ability. I fun project you could do with your students is to read them a storybook and get them to create the characters in the story out of clay. Once the characters are created you ask them to pick a chapter/scene in the story. Then ask them to re-create it using the characters out of clay and stop-motion animation. 
  2. In many schools, it is common to assign students a capstone project or an inquiry project. Basically, it is a project where a student gets to research or create anything they want. For the students who don’t have any ideas on what they should research encouraging them to make stop-motion videos is a great idea.
  3. Having students create stop-motion films about different life cycles and science processes using whatever materials they have available in the classroom can help students better visualize and grasp scientific concepts.
  4. You could also you stop-motion videos to show step-by-step math equations (addition, subtraction, division, multiplication). You could also use different visuals like a fake pizza or pie to show fractions.
  5. If you teach drama you could separate your students into groups to create skits and then get them to re-enact the skit but instead of the traditional skit telling get them to use stop-motion techniques and then present it to the class. Try to get the class to guess what the skit was about.

My Own Stop Motion Video:

Other Resources:

References:

Stop motion – Wikipedia Using Stop-Motion Animation to Teach Elementary Concepts | Kaplan Early Learning Company (kaplanco.com)