Hairy Maclary from Donaldson's Dairy

I want to share the creation of Lena’s animation and retelling of ‘Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy’. Lena decided she wanted to animate this story, one of her favourites, so we discussed how we would be able to do it.  She decided that she would draw the various characters in the story and then film them. This self -set drawing task took Lena two days to complete and then another day to film her movie. 

On the fourth day we recorded the voice over and then she was able to share her accomplishment with the other children at mat time. As usual I burnt the movie into a CD so that Lena could share her work with her extended family, at home.

 Lena's Movie

I spent part of my time at Ulearn this year exploring the use of Ipads/Ipods in education and plan to make this part of our equipment for the children to interact with next year. Since attending the related breakouts at Ulearn I have spent some time thinking about how to apply what I learnt, and have since discovered through my own exploration, into my teaching practice with our children. One thing I have come up with is to create a folder of all the movies the children are making and having it available for the children to use. I am also going to do this on the Imac the children work on.

My rationale for this is that any time the movies are played on, or through, my laptop there is instantly a large audience of very interested children. There is something about the animations that totally engages the children’s interest and enthusiasm. I am still pondering on why this is. Is it that they have observed the creation of the movies; is it that they see a lot of ‘cartoon’ type television; is it something about the simplicity of the animated stories; is it the fact they have been created by someone they know? I plan to explore this further and see what I can discover.