Claymation Holiday | SSL & ESL Game

This week’s game is perfect for the holiday season, especially if you’re looking for a multicultural and multimedia way to add some festive fun to your class.

Like last week’s game, it’s also a SSL & ESL adaptation from our new ebook...

ESL Games for 21st Century Brains:
40 ESL Classroom Games to Teach English thru STEM + Art

Students will…

• Choose a holiday or cultural tradition from their personal or ethnic background and create a three-dimensional clay scene (or sculpture) to represent it.
• Develop personal and socio-linguistic awareness through the arts, reading, writing, and communicative play.
• Explore their own cultural traditions as well as those of their classmates and friends.
• Utilize fun apps to create and share digital images of their cultural traditions via Pinterest.

21st Century Skills:

Social and cross-cultural skills, media literacy, media creation and global awareness

Materials:

1. Clay in various colors.
2. Colored paper, markers, and pencils.
3. Cardboard for the bases.
4. Construction paper.
5. Seasonal or soft music to play in the background.
6. Smartphone with a stop-motion app installed.
7. Create a stop animation clip of your own to demonstrate and/or search online for others created by students.

Grouping:

Individual or Partners

Modalities:

Bodily-Kinesthetic, Spatial, Verbal-Linguistic, Interpersonal, and Intrapersonal

Blooms Taxonomy:

Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, and Evaluation

Preparation:

1. Create three stations around the classroom:
   (1) Clay station for molding and sculpting (this can simply be at their desks).
   (2) Narration station for scripting and (if possible) recording.
   (3) Stop-motion station with a smart phone.
   This spatial set up will help to distinguish the phases of the process and allows students to help each other within each phase.
2. Start with the first station and give each student an assortment of colored clay along with a cardboard base at his or her desk.
3. Ask your students to choose a holiday or cultural tradition that they want to explore and recreate.
   The more personal the tradition is, the better. For example, if one of your student’s family always takes a New Year’s vacation to somewhere specific, whether it’s grandma’s house or the beach, have them recreate that scene or key objects from it.
4. If you have a large class ask students to decide on one tradition and work together in teams.
5. Show the class your own claymation or show some examples of stop animation to start the creative juices flowing.
6. Provide support vocabulary and phrases for the students on the board or Word Wall.
   This is a great place to bring in any seasonal language you might already be using or focusing on.
7. Allow older students to research and collect pictures and clips of their chosen tradition as examples (e.g., Google Images, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.).
   
8. In the target language, instruct your class to write down the name of the holiday or tradition they’ve selected along with support vocabulary for as many of the objects and elements they’re going to include.
9. For younger students or students without access to smartphones and apps, bring in your phone with the stop-motion app installed. If students have smartphones they can work independently and share their phone with their classmates.
10. Demonstrate how to use the stop-motion app to create a series of gestures.

Activity:

1. Start the holiday music in the background and let the clay holiday creation begin!
2. Ask students to imagine a skit with a series of gestures that symbolize the tradition. For example, lighting candles at a table, traditional dancing, setting up a tree, greetings, opening presents, etc.
3. At the clay station, students create their scenes and plan how they will design a series of gestures to represent their tradition. Ask them to practice how many movements they will need to capture so that when they get to the smart phone they will be ready.
4. At the narration station, students write or directly record, a short narration in their target language to accompany the final animation.
   
5. At the stop-motion station students create their animations.
6. Walk around and help students as needed. Encourage questions and provide support language to keep students communicating in their target language.
7. Once the animations are complete, work with students to upload their videos to YouTube or single images to a class Pinterest board. If your classroom is not equipped with internet and computers, you can do this for them later.
8. View and discuss the animations.
9. Assign homework for students to visit the Pinterest board at home and share their creations through their social networks.

Tech Tools:

• Stop Motion iPhone App ($0.99)
• Free Stop Motion Apps
• Using Pinterest in the Classroom
• Tips on Creating with Clay