Happy Accident Studios Are Pleased to Present...

  A couple weeks ago I mentioned that I came up with a new twist on our Owl Pattern Project.  It's finally finished and ready to share.  This year, instead of making the owl and cutting it out, we tried making a 3 part owl (body and two wings). After drawing the owl and the wings, kids filled their design with pattens and carefully cut the pieces out.  They hole-punched and paper-fastened the wings to the body and were pretty excited to pose them in different positions.
After photographing the owls with the wings opened and the wings closed, I noticed that quickly flipping the images back and forth in the display screen on my camera created a fun little animation.  We had a great time playing around with the images, probably not the best thing for my camera, but what can I say?  Easily amused.
Our little  discovery lead to this... 

This is my test video.  I'm not the most techno savy person on the planet and wanted to make sure I could actually make it work before diving in with a class full of kids.  Turns out it was super simple and a great starting place for introducing animation.  The animation was made by alternating two images in Windows Movie Maker which most computers have.
I've got a feeling we'll be seeing a whole lot more birds flying around here soon.
If you want to try it, here are the specifics:  to make the bird we folded a 9X12 piece of paper in half.  The first half was used to draw the body of the owl.  We did this as a guided drawing.  Then kids cut their paper on the fold.  They folded the second piece of paper in half and penciled in the shape of the wing.  Kids used a sharpie to outline the wing on both sides of the paper so they could transfer the outline and get two matching wings.