The use of animation to promote creativity and motivation for Year 9 students at Crofton School.

Institution: Crofton School
Crofton School is a mixed 11 – 16 comprehensive school and Science Specialist College in Hampshire. The school have just over 1000 students. Students achieve well at Crofton School and the targets are FFT D. Crofton School has recently invested in an extensive wireless system and hopes to encourage students to buy net books which will enhance and facilitate the use of ICT throughout the school. The school teaches French and German at KS 3 and 4 alternating the languages each year so that they have equal status.

Modern Language uptake at KS 4 is just over 50% and MFL is amongst the highest achieving subjects within the school.

Context:
The animation project was piloted with two year nine language groups.

The intention was to pilot the project and then roll it out to the whole year group but many problems were encountered that it was decided to run two projects and roll it out next year.

Key Objectivies:
To improve participation and motivation in languages with two set two year nine classes and to encourage creativity.

How the programme is organised:
Two year 9 groups both set 2 completed the animation project. These students achieve well but they are not the highest achievers and motivation can dwindle, especially once the options for KS 4 have been chosen. Students had to create their own story. They had to brainstorm ideas and once the group had decided on a topic they had to allocate tasks to each member in their group. They then had to write a script (which was corrected by the teacher). They had to create/bring along all props/background material as well as the characters for their animation project. The teacher provided a large selection of Barbie and Ken dolls as the first project was “A Day in the life of Barbie and Ken”. Students then completed the filming, exported the clip into Movie Maker to complete the voiceover and editing of the story. It was vital that the students rehearsed the dialogue at length before they recorded it in order to improve their pronunciation and intonation. Well rehearsed scripts were of a much higher quality!

At the end the students viewed the project and peer assessed each other’s work. Everybody had a great time!

Evidence of success:
The students really enjoyed both projects. They loved the freedom to create their own story and the work with animation itself. Some of the students lost interest quite quickly but some students even chose to work through lunch in order to complete the project. Some boys who found it hard to motivate themselves in lesson time were extremely engaged and ended up helping others. It also gave some students more street credibility as they were the experts.

Students had a great time working on this project. The filming added status and curiosity from other students. SLT were also involved and I hope we will be able to bid for extra funding which will make the running of the project easier. 

 “Great fun”  “awesome” “best lessons of the year” (Year 9 students)

Future developments:
Crofton School would like to increase the site license for the programme “I can animate” which will make it a lot easier to run the project. The school would like to include this project into the Year 9 curriculum to increase engagement and motivation.

Download this Word document (17kb) for further advice and information about using animation in language lessons.

Author: Barbara Hlavaty, Head of Languages.