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You will need
• Saucepan
• Access to a cooker
• Water
• Eggs
• Colouring pens
• A3 paper
• Duplo matt
• Duplo or lego (lots of it!)
• Digital camera
• Cress seeds (you can use a variety of different seeds to achieve different types of haircuts)
• Cotton wool
• Water
• Syringe
• Light box (not essential)
• 30cm ruler
• Top Pan Balance (available from any secondary school if you are going to weigh the seeds)
• Wooden block for your eggs to sit in.
• Computer
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Software needed
• Movie Maker (downloadable) free with Windows XP or Vista – or Imovie.
• A painting program such as Windows Paint, Paint. Net or RM Colour Magic
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Age Group Y2 - Y4
AIM
• To introduce children to the scientific concepts of growth and photosynthesis in a creative manner.
• To develop a greater understanding and opportunities for use of ICT through animation. The outcome of this will be for the children to make a stop frame animation film of cress seeds growing to look like hair.
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Day One Objectives
• To discuss and formulate an understanding about growth and photosynthesis.
• To start to make several short animation films using Paint/Colour Magic and Microsoft Movie Maker which demonstrate the growth of cress from seed to harvest.
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Lesson Plan
• Cook eggs until boiled and eat with toast– discuss the production/growth of chickens, egg production, production of grain and how this is used to make bread. Discuss their nutritional importance. Also discuss the great combination of egg and cress.
• Look at the pictures of Edible Playground cress heads that were so popular within the Dorset Cereals’ gold award winning courtyard garden at The RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2008 and watch a bit of the Edible Playground film.
• Watch a short animation here - check first for suitability for age group you are working with. Alternatively watch Bob the Builder, Postman Pat, Charlie and Lola etc.
• Look at a flip book (make one in the corners of a paperback – we used James and the Giant Peach!) and Pivot Software (free download here). This helps explain the concept of movement in film being lots of pictures (25 per second to be precise!)
• Draw faces on eggs using felt pens. Then make backdrop and stage out of Duplo/Lego. Using a Duplo mat, build a ‘stage’ to house the digital camera and backdrop. It is vital that the camera doesn’t move over the 7- 10 days it will take for the cress hair to grow. The Duplo/Lego construction will hold the camera in place. Place a white piece of paper/card on the floor of the stage to reflect light back onto your eggs.
• Plant seeds in cotton wool in each egg – discuss photosynthesis.
• The cress seeds could be in front of a ruler so that the more able pupils can work out how fast the cress seeds grow.
• Pupils could weigh the cress seeds before they are planted and after they are removed, so that the pupils can learn where the extra weight has come from. A common misconception amongst primary pupils is that the mass of the tree comes from the soil.
• The more able pupils should begin to appreciate that sunlight provides the energy to make the cress seeds from carbon dioxide and water.
• Explain what you will need to do with the camera. You will need to take two pictures a day; one at beginning of school and one at the end of school
• Take one photo of your egg on the stage and use Colour Magic to make each egg/speak/blink/wink on individual computers. When transferring image from camera to computers, the teacher should resize each picture to 800 x 600 pixels. Windows Picture Manager will help you do this either individually – use the ‘edit picture’ facility or you can resize batches of pictures by viewing them in thumbnail view and again use edit pictures….
• Before drawing the different faces i.e mouth open, winks, blinks etc discuss facial movements of your mouth opening and shutting, closing eyes... Save each picture separately, it helps to name each picture as to what is happening in each i.e. ‘left egg mouth open’.
• Then take lots of photos of the eggs moving in the wooden blocks, move each egg a bit at a time to create movement in your film… eggs can do the twist, rock, roll and jump (put a piece of blutack under them!)
• Set up data loggers to record growth of the eggs for an experiment.
• Place the Duplo stage under a light box or by a window sill, water and relax!
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Days 2-7
• Water the eggs carefully every day (a syringe helps) making sure they are not ‘drowned’ or left to dry out. Make sure that the children take a picture in the morning and evening. Do not disturb the stage apart from to water and record the image.
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Day 8
• Record jokes for soundtrack and you could record children playing their own music on a recorder e.g.... ‘chick, chick, chicken lay a little egg for me’ or Humpty Dumpty. You can record directly to Movie Maker: go to >Tools > Narrate Time Line >. You can also use laughter and sound effects. All material used in your egg movie should be original. You can also use the free program Audacity to record sounds and then import into Movie Maker as Mp3. http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
• Assemble images, sounds, jokes and music in Movie Maker so that it looks like your hair is growing and your eggs are moving and talking.
• Top tip number one.....Use the sound wave images in the audio track to see when the mouths of the eggs should be open or closed!
• Top tip number two go to Tools > Options > Advance Options and change the picture duration to 0.125 seconds when bulk importing image from collection to timeline…. You get very quick results!
• Top tip number three: When your film is finished, save first your 'moviemaker' project file, then 'Save Movie File'. This creates or renders your movie as a WMV file. Follow the instructions for 'playback on my computer'. It will be this WMV file you need to submit for the competition. For Mac users, the process is similar but you will have made a Quicktime file, this can also be submitted.
• Don’t forget to put a fade up and a fade down on the front and end of your films. Also, you might want to add a title and credits.
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Finished Films
Upload your film to www.filmsforlearning.org
If you want to share your film with your friends and other schools you can upload them to the Films for Learning website.
• To upload your film you need to visit www.filmsforlearning.org
• Click on ‘upload your first film here’, which will then require you to create a Windows Live ID Account and then you can create your own Films for Learning (FfL) Account.
• When you have signed up, go to ‘Submit film’ and follow the on-screen instructions.
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The Edible Playgrounds Cress Head animation project was devised and co-ordinated by Mark Richardson, Thomas Hardye School, Dorchester, Dorset. With kind help from David Morgan from the Science Outreach team and Richard Scott from the DASP Partnership. The Project was tried and tested by the pupils from Cerne Abbas Primary School, Dorset.
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Films for Learning
Films for Learning is about teachers and learners making their own learning films and sharing them with others. A “film for learning” can explain and teach something or demonstrate learning taking place – just like a cress head film.
In fact, if you have made other films you could upload and share those on the Films for Learning website – it’s entirely free (though please check our rules regarding copyright etc). Follow the links from the FFL Theatre to the FFL Community, where there are free downloadable resources, blogs and forums for film-makers in school or at home.
The website contains no advertising and no inappropriate links, and we moderate all content before it goes live. Unlike all other video-sharing sites, there is no commercial angle to Films for Learning; it has received funding and help from NESTA, The Innovation Unit and Microsoft but is run voluntarily by teachers for anyone who wants to learn and share their “learning films”.
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