Animation and MFL's

[Oscar Stringer]

I had a great day yesterday, working with 20 Primary teachers from LA's in the West Midlands. They were all Modern Languages teachers and had signed up to my two hour workshop to find out how animation can help teach French and Spanish, keeping the students engaged and thinking about different languages and cultures, as well as their own. We decided to do adverts, keeping all minds focused is always a challenge and short adverts around a product or idea automatically keep everyone involved thinking along the same lines. The brief also kept the animations short and simple which is best if you haven't got much time and it's your first go at animating.

Top tips from the yesterday, keep the idea so painfully simple, with a small cast and produce a short advert, using Spanish or French.

The five groups of four teachers spent 35 minutes brain storming ideas and model making. Then 10 minutes writing their advert, 40 minutes filming and about 10 minutes adding their music and voices/sound effects. Ideally you want at least 30 mins adding sound etc and also it needs a quiet space/zone/library, so you don't get lots of background chatter.

You can check out the animations made in the video section here at this animated Ning.

OS

[Lisa Stevens]

Having seen the feedback from the session, everyone thoroughly enjoyed it and went away enthused and excited about the prospect of using animation in the Primary language classroom. And that excitement extended to those who saw the outcomes in the plenary and ahdn't been to the workshop!
Thanks for sharing the videos too - good to see what can be done in such a short time - it's amazing.
Off to search the kids toybox for their plastic animals - if I can bear to let the class touch my precious Mac, we're animating tomorrow ;o)