Best Stop Motion Tips

If you've ever wanted to have your students make stop-motion videos and you're not sure where to start, this video is for you. My first tip would be to pick a topic that lends itself well to stop-motion. It does not work well for every topic. You're going to want to pick something where it's very visual and students can show you what they've learned in a visual way. A great example could be mitosis or meiosis. It's visual. I want to see that students know the different phases of mitosis and how a cell splits from one into two or one into four for mitosis and meiosis respectively. Pick something that is going to lend itself well to stop-motion. Next tip, let's talk supplies. You don't want to spend a bunch of money in order for students to do this. The first thing is to look around your classroom. What do you already have? Is there a kit that your school already owns that you could use for stop-motion? For example, mitosis and meiosis is fresh on my brain because it's a topic that I just taught with students and did a stop-motion project with. My school already owns these kits where students have these little magnetic centromeres and then they use the pop beads to represent genes on the chromosomes. They build these. Each one of these little beads is a gene. They're magnetic. They stick together. I provided them a whiteboard and a marker so they would build their chromosomes. They could switch the colors around for crossing over for meiosis. They made a stop-motion video for me using these. Here's a sample so you can see what that would look like. Here's some other materials I've used in the past. These are Legos. Real Legos are expensive, but dollar store Legos are not. These are all from Dollar Tree. Legos work great when we did plate tectonics. They would build a house and they would show the different plate boundaries. Some students showed the house crumbling. I actually bought sponges from the dollar store, too, for the different plates. That was just an option. Clay is always a great one. It can be reused. This kind of clay can be reused over and over. Unlike Play-Doh, it doesn't dry out. Kinetic sand also doesn't dry out. I've used kinetic sand when we did landforms and landform formation and how they evolve over time. Yarn. Again, just look for things around your room. Students will be creative and find ways to use it. Next up, you might be thinking, what app or what technology do students need? Obviously, they're going to need some sort of device to take pictures on. I had students do it on their phones. If you live in a state where there's a strict cell phone ban, then that might not work for you. But on their phones, there's a free app called Stop Motion Studio that I recommended for students to use. There's a free and a paid version. The only catch is in the free version, they need to take their pictures within the app. They can't take the pictures in the camera roll of their phone and then try and import them into the free version. It'll try and get them to pay. Make sure that they download the app first, take the pictures within the app. It literally is super easy, user-friendly to use, and it creates a quick stop motion video for them after they have taken their pictures. Also, students have asked, can I use something else? Can I use CapCut? Can I use TikTok? Can I use whatever app? I don't have TikTok. I tell students that. I'm old. I don't use it. But if you know that there's a stop motion filter in there that works for you, great, use it. So iMovie is one thing that if your students do have that app on their phone, it works. It's not my favorite. The transitions are kind of clunky. So that's the only one that I usually tell students if you have it on your phone already, great, use it, but it's not my favorite. If students are really adamant that they're not going to use an app, they don't have room to download an app, they don't want to do it. I have had cases where I just let students take pictures in their camera roll and then swipe through and show me. That's not as fun. It doesn't turn it into a video, but that is like a plan B if you really can't do that. Or if students only have Chromebooks that take pictures, they can't use cell phones, then that could maybe be an option for you. One extra tip I tell students when they're using whatever app of their choice, it doesn't matter, is to make sure that their hand is the same distance from the table for each picture. So they don't want to take a picture here and then move their stuff and then take a picture here and here because when it turns it into a video, it's not going to look smooth and the transitions are going to be really poor. So I tell students try and keep your hand the same distance from the table each time to keep it consistent and then the video looks a lot better at the end. Next tip, and the question that I know your student's going to ask because they ask me every time, Miss, can I work with a partner? I tell them yes, but here is my kind of guidelines. First off, I always tell them the number of pictures that they have to have. Otherwise, they're going to do the bare minimum and it's not going to turn out very well. So I usually say you have to have a minimum of 20 pictures or a minimum of 40 pictures. It kind of depends on the topic and how many pictures I think it's going to take. Now, here's the catch. If I say you work alone and you need 20 pictures to show me a convergent boundary or a divergent boundary, if you work with a partner, then you need to have 30 pictures. So I always up the number of pictures and the length of the video that students need to turn in if they work with a partner. That's something that's worked for me. Maybe you want to use that same guideline. Next, let's talk grading. I give students clear things that requirements that they need to include in their video, but I also want to allow for some creativity so not every video comes back to me looking the same. So say, for example, that I am doing plate tectonics and some students are doing a convergent boundary. Some students have to show me a transform boundary. Some students have to show me a divergent boundary. I will put up on the board clear expectations. So you need to have a minimum of 20 pictures. You need to somehow in the video show me the name of the boundary. Maybe I give chalk markers out and they write on the desk convergent boundary at the top. You need to clearly show me the movement of the plate boundary. So I should be able to tell is it transform, is it divergent. From there, then you have some creativity. So as long as you meet those requirements, then you're going to get full credit. If you want to add some extra stuff, if you want to show at a convergent boundary that it often forms volcanoes, grab some clay, have a volcano forming, that's awesome. You're going to get extra points. So make sure that students have some wiggle room to be creative and have fun, but also in order to get credit, make it clear on exactly what needs to be in their video. Lastly, how long is this going to take you? Do you need to schedule in one day, two class periods, multiple class periods? I have found that over time, the more that you do with students, the quicker it gets. So the very first time you ever do a stop motion video with students, you probably aren't going to get it done in one class period if your class periods are like 50 minutes, which is kind of an average for a lot of us. So maybe the first class period, the first time you do it, one class period is going to be, here's your topic, give them a blank sheet of paper and have them kind of like draw a cartoon or a timeline of what are you going to put in your video so they have it planned. What materials do you want to use? Have it planned. Is there something from home you want to bring in tomorrow to add to your video so that way they have a plan? And then day two, then they would do their video. If it is a quick and easy topic and you've done stop motion before, you could probably get it done in one class period. So it just kind of depends and also the number of pictures that you want to include. Is it going to be 20 pictures? Is it going to be 50 pictures? It's going to obviously impact how much time you need to schedule. So long story short, if it's your first time, plan for multiple class periods. If students have already done it, they have the hang of it and it's an easy topic, 50 minutes should be plenty. Once they are done and they're ready to turn it in, I have them upload it into, we use Microsoft Teams, maybe use Google Classroom, whatever it is, but it's really easy to, especially in stop motion studio, have them save it to their camera roll. They open up Teams on their phone and then I created a folder where they just upload it to. They could email it to you. Depending on the length of the video, sometimes email gets a little clunky and it wants to send it as an attachment and the attachment's too big. So uploading it directly into your LMS seems to be the best bet. If you have a question that I didn't answer, just leave it in the comments and I will try and get to it. 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