Return To Littletown Early Years

After a long gap of 18 months I had the opportunity to return to Littletown School today for a 3 day project drawing with Nursery and Reception children. What a lovely productive day with a prolific and focussed group. Super fantastic! I can't wait until next week when the colour work begins......

Habitats - Hyrstmount Animation Project - Day 6

Today has been the last day of the animation project at Hyrstmount Junior School. The children have recorded the narration for their film which they have delivered in a documentary style. They have also photographed the titles for the credit sequence and gathered together all the artwork they have created throughout the project, ready for a wonderful display in school.

Sound recording

This has been a fantastic project and the children have been a joy to work with. Here's a run down of everything they have been involved in throughout the creation of their Habitats Film...

Continuous Line Drawing

Designing characters

Exploring animals and their habitats through large drawings

Drawing animals in their habitats with berol pens and a water wash

Designing cardboard characters for the replacement animation technique

Creating the backgrounds

Animating the characters

Animating the characters on set

The children have also been involved in recording the narration, researching animals and their habitats, writing and sharing. What a fantastic project! Well done everyone!!

Habitats - Hyrstmount Animation Project - Day 5

The children at Hyrstmount Junior School have had another fantastic day working on their Habitats Animation Project. This morning saw the creation of a second owl character and ten replacement owls were made in less than 20 minutes by a group of enthusiastic pupils. The remainder of the day was filled with animating, animating and more animating! As a result of this the animation phase is now complete and tomorrow sees a day of sound recording, music creation and narration. Yay!

Pupil diary extracts:
"Today was a fabulous day with the artists because me and Noor had so much fun filming and playing. It was fun!"

"Today I went with Paul and did some pictures and swapped the badgers and owls. I broke the flower [which was part of the set], Paul got his glue gun and fixed it. And then we watched the clip. It looked like the badger was on a skateboard!"

Habitats - Hyrstmount Animation Project - Day 4

It was the first animating day at Hyrstmount Junior School today and the children produced some lovely animation for their Habitats Film. The animation process often takes a long time and can get quite complicated when lots of characters are moving at different speeds, but the children were very focused and they grasped it quickly. In and amongst the animating the children finished off the final two characters - the Squirrel and the Red Deer, and by the end of the day they had even managed to animate a close up of each of these characters.

"Today was a marvelous day with the artists because we were filming the animals. We took pictures and swapped the animals. It is called animation." A pupil diary extract

Habitats - Hyrstmount Animation Project - Day Three

We have had an excellent day today at Hyrstmount Junior School. The children have been busy making backgrounds for their animation set, along with finishing off the cardboard characters that they started yesterday. For the backgrounds the children have designed intricately patterned fields, trees, hills and flowers which look fantastic.

First of all they designed their backgrounds on big sheets of card and used black berol pens to fill in the detail......

Then the children put a wash of water over their pen lines to create a lovely painterly effect.

In the afternoon we began to build the set and place the characters ready for the start of the animation tomorrow. The sets and the characters look wonderful!

At the end of the day the children wrote diary extracts, reflecting on their day. Here are some of their comments...

"Today I had a great time. We designed patterns for the fields and water washed them."

"Today I made a fabulous hill with spots and stripes on. It was amazing. I loved it and had a brilliant time!"

"I made some robins and wet them. Then with the pen I drew white posca lines around the robin. I also drew a badger and a tree."


"Today I went to the mobile classroom and I drew on the tree. It was so good!

Habitats - Hyrstmount Animation Project - Day 2

Today saw the start of an exciting week at Hyrstmount Junior School in Batley. The children transformed their character designs into cardboard characters which will come to life later on in the week when the children begin animating. In line with the replacement technique, the children have created 10 replacements of each character and on each replacement they have drawn a body part in a slightly different position, therefore creating the effect of movement once the characters are animated. The children have been fantastic and have produced some beautiful animal characters including a badger, rabbit, snail, owl, brown rat and a fox. You can see some of the characters being created in the images below!