Animation is a fun way for children to express their ideas through a medium that blends art, storytelling, drawing, illustration, design, graphics, sculpture, acting, staging, art directing and filmmaking into one amazing form capable of transforming its creators into magicians. Animation is unbounded by time or reality. It brings to life visions and ideas that are the artist’s creation, limited only by their imagination. With this in mind GoAnimate is a fun software used in-browser that lets you make animated videos for free. Animations can be made in as little as 10 minutes and you don’t have to worry about drawing as it has pre-made characters available, you can create your own cast of characters but will have to become a paying member. There are a variety of packages available but we used the free option which had the limited characters but was more than enough for what we had in mind.
A wonderful and easy animation creation software, and it's all browser based too!
The children were given the task of creating an animation for Halloween. Each pair of children created their own account and their videos were kept private until they had finished and then made public. The children felt very excited as their work was published online and they could share it with the world. To publish on YouTube you have to be a paying member but for our purposes we just placed the links to the videos on our school website. Here are a few examples of our work which were created by children aged 11. Enjoy!
LINK- TES lesson plans