We reminded ourselves of the work made by Eadweard Muybridge by looking again at his still photographs of a horse in motion. Edward discovered that when still images were viewed very fast they appeared to show movement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eadweard_Muybridge#/media/File:The_Horse_in_Motion.jpg

A discussion followed in which the children offered comments on how they thought the still images seemed to move…

On the whiteboard screen I showed two images:

I had sent two wooden mannequins down to the class who were promptly named Sally and Quinn. The children moved the arms of the models up and down slowly to see how a simple movement like raising arms could be broken down into stages.

We realised that viewing lots of pictures quickly would make our eyes believe something was moving. I told the children about my son’s flip book from a trip to USA:

I had sent down lots of post-it notepads for the children to try a simple flip book idea. We talked about what we could draw to show movement. Sarah had a great idea of drawing a snowball getting bigger and bigger…

Of course we had to be mindful where we placed each snowball on the page so it remained in the one place.

While the children set to work on theirs, I began mine…

We had the idea of recording a large Christmas tree as it got decorated… The children each drew and cut out a Christmas decoration for the tree, then one  by one they placed it on the tree.

A discussion followed as to what we would now do with these 27 pictures! They soon discovered that if they simply flicked through the string of thumbnail photographs the larger images would flash past on the screen…

We thought in the New Year we could explore this all further…

Happy Christmas P3 & 4 and Mrs Hughes! See you in 2017!