Describing characters has never been this much fun! Joe’s first graders spent some time going through a text, creating trading cards for each character, and then adding an AR (augmented reality) flare to it all.
Drew Daywalt and Oliver Jeffers’ “The Day the Crayons Quit” has become a loved book amongst teachers, parents, and students. In this highly entertaining book, the crayons write letters to a young boy named Duncan, as they are fed up with how they are being treated. To make the read aloud interACTIVE, you can download the Novel Effect app. This app uses the microphone built into your smart phone to listen as you read. When you read certain words along the way, sound effects and music is played.
After reading, we moved on to describing the characters. We did this by using a Bubble Map, which includes only adjectives. We revisited each character, creating a trading card for each.
Next, we used the app Chatterpix Kids to “animate” the illustrations, which later became the AR videos. Chatterpix Kids is a primary friendly (but fun for all ages) app that allows you to draw a mouth over a still image, and give it the appearance that it is talking. We repeated this process for each of the characters.
After we recorded on Chatterpix, we exported the files and saved them to the device’s camera roll. From there, we “app smashed,” or uploaded, the videos into Flipgrid. Each student submitted an initial response, but then they responded to themselves. Once completed, we printed out each video response’s QR code. This code was then glued to the trading cards. When scanned with the Flipgrid QR code reader, it will open in AR!
I also gave the students the opportunity to illustrate the back of the cards. As an added bonus, I had the students “level” the characters based on how much they thought the crayons effected Dunkin’s thinking. We’ve been working with tens and ones in math recently, so this fit right in! Each student “leveled” the characters on a scale from 10-100, with a 100 being the character that has the biggest impact. Once the activity was completed, we added up the total of the lvels for a grand total. Check out the entire video tutorial below!
Interested in trying this out in your classroom?
Here’s all the resources you need:
The Day the Crayons Quit book
Novel Effect app
Trading Card Template
Chatterpix Kids app
Flipgrid app
Be sure to tag us on social media! We’d love to see how you’re using this in your classroom!
For more #interACTIVE lesson ideas using Flipgrid, check out our book The InterACTIVE Class on Amazon!
