Newscasts from Ancient Japan

Students transform ideas into animated news reports for ancient Japan.

Have you ever wanted to see your students so engaged in learning that they are anxious to come to your class, ready to learn, and so actively involved in their work you barely know they are in the computer lab? What teacher wouldn‘t? In searching for a project that fit this description, our ideas transformed into an animated news report that would explore and reinforce the concepts sixth-grade students were learning at St. Joseph Grade School while studying Ancient Japan.

We began by finding nine subtopics in our Social Studies textbook chapter on Ancient Japan. Students perused the topics, came up with their own, and ranked their top three choices by interest. Students then went back, completed research on their particular topic before working on a storyboard plan for sharing their topic in a newscast.

Before working on their individual animations, we explored the Ancient Egypt Action News example and talked about developing animation that made the news reporter‘s mouth move while broadcasting, adding backgrounds to the newscast, and inserting voice. Students also explore Pics4Learning.com to find graphics that would help explain their topic. We reviewed the drawing tool in Frames and students explored the Create an Animated News Report tutorial. Being a program the students love anyway, they took off with Frames using their own creativity and imaginations.

When the students finished their individual topics, they were assigned to a team whose task was to develop a longer newscast that incorporated each team member‘s animation. Having a balance of topics gave them the opportunity to create a frame at the end or beginning that introduced the next topic, similar to that of a real newscast.

The students were actively engaged in the learning process and took great pride in their finished animation. I was truly impressed at the level they took the assignment and the imagination that blossomed in each team‘s process. Not only were they challenged to make their own newscast, but they were continually helping and encouraging one another. It was definitely a project that they took to new levels, kept them engaged in their learning, and incorporated higher level thinking skills.