Ever wanted to animate your kid’s drawings? Keep reading to learn about a perfect ESL kids activity.
How to get started
To get started all we need to do is go to:
The next thing you need is a picture. You can use one of the sample pictures to see how it works or if you want to skip that, you can go ahead and start drawing a picture.
Get animating your drawing
Once you’ve drawn your picture you’re then going to take a photo of it. Now, upload it to the website and click next. You’ll need to either agree or disagree to some privacy policy. Next, you’ll need to tell the website where the character is exactly.
Close the box around your picture to make sure that the website has selected all of it. Next you have to tell the website where the head, legs and arms are. You can now see your drawing animated. There are currently only four action categories on this website, you’ve got dance, funny, jumping and walking.
My students love drawing animals so I also went through the same steps as above. There are some issues with the points to connect body parts and it can take some time to make sure the points are as close as possible. If you don’t get the points quite right then you’re going to have some pretty terrifying results!
Ways to use this in your ESL kid’s class
I’m going to use this with my students, especially with my younger learners. Once they’ve drawn their characters I’m going to get them to name them. In one of my classes we were practicing the present continuous to describe actions. They used phrases such as:
(name of character) is dancing
Get the students to choose one of their favorite songs from YouTube and play it over the animations. If you choose the category ‘funny’, students can produce language such as:
(name of character) is practicing boxing
Why not introduce some adverbs?
(name of character) is walking SLOWLY
My students loved this website because they really enjoyed seeing the pictures that they draw in class being brought to life on the screen. If you’re going to use this website in your class then make sure you take a phone or a camera to take a picture of the students’ drawings.
Activities that are interactive are crucial in a ESL kid’s class. Why not check out my post on the platform ‘Wordwall’? This platform can provide your young learners with lots of opportunities to do vocabulary and grammar review tasks that are fun.
Good luck animating with this perfect ESL kids activity!