moving in Manila.

As part of their movement unit, the 1st graders are getting a chance to experience stop motion and green screen film making this week.

I'm introducing them to contemporary Filipino artist Robert Alejandro with this project. We are looking at a short interview he did last year to start things off. He talks about the role of art in his childhood.

We then look at a few illustrations he has done of Filipino jeepneys. We notice the patterning of shape, line, and color on these and we contrast them with the buses we see around San Diego.

Our role for the day is that of a jeepney designer. We draw and decorate our own jeepney that will then be part of a traffic jam in Manila.

We watch a jeepney how-to in chunks, so that our jeepneys get drawn, patterned, traced, colored, and cut. After that I work with small groups of kids to move their vehicles across our table top green screen, being careful not to crash into each other in the process;)

As a few kids are working with me, others can go to centers and build with a variety of supplies. The filming takes about 10 minutes. Then we regroup, look at the movie with green background, add our city sounds, and then combine the movie with a photograph of a street in Manila as the background.

The kids have gotten a big kick out of seeing their drawings come alive!