Idioms Stop-Motion – Jenny K., Kelly, Rachel

Dear Jenny, Kelly and Rachel,

Wow! This is a brilliant video — thanks very much for your time and effort in its production. The drawings are clever and the video production is clean with the only challenge (which is often a challenge) being lighting changes. Those shifts in light, though, contribute to the vintage feel, along with the music, and so it’s not necessarily a drawback.

Your write up speaks to all the necessary points in a cursory fashion. It would have been useful, though, to speak to how you produced the video with a view to providing enough information that others could replicate the project with their own students. How many shots did you take? how fast was the frame-per-second rate? Which application did you use for video editing?

In terms of assessment, you note you’d focus on students’ understanding of the idioms and not their production skills. To a point I think that’s a good idea; however, if students spend a good deal of time completing stop motion animation it would be perhaps beneficial to reward them in some respect for their efforts. There are many stop-motion animation rubrics online (Google “stop-motion animation rubric” to find dozens). Perhaps take a look and think about which might best suit your purposes. If you find one, paste the link in the comment thread below.

Thanks again for this outstanding project!

Best regards,

Teresa