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Important update from TheSchoolRun

For the past 13 years, TheSchoolRun has been run by a small team of mums working from home, dedicated to providing quality educational resources to primary school parents. Unfortunately, rising supplier costs and falling revenue have made it impossible for us to continue operating, and we’ve had to make the difficult decision to close. The good news: We’ve arranged for another educational provider to take over many of our resources. These will be hosted on a new portal, where the content will be updated and expanded to support your child’s learning.

What this means for subscribers:

  • Your subscription is still active, and for now, you can keep using the website as normal — just log in with your usual details to access all our articles and resources*.
  • In a few months, all resources will move to the new portal. You’ll continue to have access there until your subscription ends. We’ll send you full details nearer the time.
  • As a thank you for your support, we’ll also be sending you 16 primary school eBooks (worth £108.84) to download and keep.

A few changes to be aware of:

  • The Learning Journey weekly email has ended, but your child’s plan will still be updated on your dashboard each Monday. Just log in to see the recommended worksheets.
  • The 11+ weekly emails have now ended. We sent you all the remaining emails in the series at the end of March — please check your inbox (and spam folder) if you haven’t seen them. You can also follow the full programme here: 11+ Learning Journey.

If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected]. Thank you for being part of our journey it’s been a privilege to support your family’s learning.

*If you need to reset your password, it will still work as usual. Please check your spam folder if the reset email doesn’t appear in your inbox.

3 easy animation activities for kids

Animation activities for children
Making your own animations needn’t be a daunting prospect – creating simple but effective animations with even the most basic artistic skills has never been easier! Children (and parents!) can have great fun making up characters and seeing them come to life, and the brilliant results might just surprise you! Trevor Young, author of animated eBook Galdo's Gift, has tips to get you started.

Stop motion is a way of creating a movie from a series of still photographs. There are many free apps nowadays that can help you do this which are easy to use and only require a phone or a tablet; once you’ve found one, here are some great activities you can do.

Create coloured paper movies

Cut up bits of coloured paper that will become the arms, legs, body, head, etc. of your characters. They can be very basic shapes and you can have fun making up crazy characters by placing various parts together on a table top. 

Use your animation app to take a photo of your table top scene.

You might find it helps to weigh down or use masking tape to stick a page to the table that will contain your scene; this is because you can line up the corners of the camera image with one or more corners of the page containing your scene to keep the framing of each photo consistent. This stops the whole scene from jumping around when you play back your movie!

After you have taken your first picture of your scene, move the coloured paper pieces slightly and take another shot. Keep doing this until you have taken ten images or so, then play back your mini movie using the play button in the app.  

Try making a playdough movie

Coloured modelling clay is fantastic for stop motion animation – you have the fun of creating weird and wonderful characters and then seeing them move about! 

Once again it is helpful to have something on the tabletop to help you frame your photos in a similar way for each shot. Creating a stage set from a cardboard box is a great way to do this: just a cardboard box with a hole cut in the side with the interior covered in paper can become the beginnings of some scenery/stage for your characters. It also helps as a guide for positioning your camera view to more closely match up each photo.

Become your own animated movie

That’s right, you can create a stop motion movie with almost anything, including yourself! 

Using the stop motion app, try taking a photo of someone standing upright with their feet together. Then, keeping the camera as still as possible, get them to move just a little bit to one side and put their feet together again and then take another photo. Repeat this about ten times and then play it back on the app and it will look like they can magically move across the floor without moving their feet! 

There’s lots of fun to be had bringing objects to life. Clothes can animate out of the wash basket, cups and saucers can chase each other across the table top... let your imagination run wild!

Free animation resources for kids

Itching for more? Go to www.galdosgift.com/cool-stuff for some fun animating activities which use the characters from the new children’s book Galdo’s Gift. You can access video guides, printable PDFs and links to a brilliant free animation app.

Animate It, Aardman Animations' website, offers free videos, free animation prop kits and links to the Animate It! software, £29.99.

Galdo’s Gift is an interactive children’s book, which is now available from the iBooks store for £6.99.