Clay animation is a motivating process you can use to engage students as they explore and grapple with complex scientific topics. Science education is designed to provide students with the skills to become independent inquirers about the natural world. The National Academy of Science encourages teachers to use collaboration as a tool so that students participate in the sharing of data and development of group reports. They also suggest that students should be given opportunities to make presentations of their work and “engage with their classmates in explaining, clarifying, and justifying what they have learned.” Clay animation is perfect for supporting this learning environment!

First of all, clay animation helps make many science processes and concepts tangible. In What Works in Classroom Instruction, Marzano explains that humans store knowledge in linguistic and visual form. For concepts that are hard to explain in writing, creating non-linguistic representations with clay animations can help students explore and remember information. Because science topics range from very small things like atomic particles to very large structures like the solar system, it is difficult to explore many concepts in a tangible way. Clay animation allows for hands-on manipulation and the creation of physical models, helping students analyze scientific structures and processes like cell division and plate tectonics.

While students are motivated by creating their final animation products, it is the process of making clay animation, including writing, brainstorming, planning, sequencing, team work, and management, where the real learning takes place. As they plan their clay animation to demonstrate a science process, such as plant growth, students must use logical thinking skills to sequence the steps. Critical thinking skills are required to analyze the process and determine what factors are necessary for each step in the process and movement from one step to the next. As students create the clay animation, they must evaluate the information and work together to determine the most effective way to demonstrate the concept or process they are animating.

Collaboration is a necessary component of successful classroom clay animation. Consider, for example a project on cell division. If each team attempts to animate the entire process of cell division, due to time constraints, the resulting animations might not include all of the essential information and details. On the other hand, if each team were to animate one phase in the process, the entire class could combine their animations into one presentation. The whole class will still need to look at the entire process to determine what colors and shapes to use. This ensures that models display cell structures like the nucleus and cell walls consistiently throughour the animation. Each team would also have to work with the team before it and after it to ensure that no part of the cell division process was missed.

Students at Bauer Elementary in Hudsonville, Michigan create a clay animation as the culminating assessment of a unit on plant and animal life cycles.