We returned to our information Voicethreads today that we created yesterday about the different planets in our solar system. I wanted the children to consolidate some of the information that they had learned about the planets.
To do this we asked the children to create a superhero that represented a planet and some of it’s characteristics. Clearly this ties in well with the topic we are running, and provided the children some rehearsal for when they create their own original hero. But I think works well whether you are doing this topic or not, as a superhero is ideal for personifying the different physical characteristics of the planets.
We had a look at two different free online superhero creators: from Marvel Kids and HeroMachine from UGO. Both are very good but we decided that the HeroMachine had more choice in terms of customising the hero. This would of course provide better choice for the children when creating their own. (We used HeroMachine version 2.5 rather than the Alpha version 3.0) Both creators give you a massive palette of masks, skins, tails, accessories, wings, auras and insignias (plus much more) these can all be coloured, layered and customised.
The children were working in pairs on laptops in the classroom. I gave each pair a planet to work on and directed them to three things for information:
- The Voicethread we made that gathered everyone’s information in one place, a good starting point.
- Websites tagged with “planets” from our Delicious account.
- Any other web based resources they can find.
Before they set off I opened HeroMachine and demonstrated making a character representing Earth and highlighted the choices I was making and the reasons I made them – like a modelled writing session. For example the colours green and blue and why I used more blue to show the ratio of water to land. I emphasised the need to understand the planet they were representing and asked them to think of colour, size and atmosphere. This kept it simple and achievable as some planetary facts are too complex to represent.
You can see the start of a Jupiter based superhero here in which children have chosen the largest hero body to show it’s size and also a red belt which they explained represents the red spot on Jupiter.
Venus is represented here and is shown with the colours of heat as it is close to the Sun with surface temperatures over 460 degrees Celsius.
One pair spent some time looking at a Wikipedia article on Saturn and decided that they would make a male superhero because Saturn was a God, which is great – they went on to explore ways they could represent the rings with either superhero clothes or objects he would carry.
I am looking forward to finishing these off with the children, it has been a great way to personify the facts about the planets and has really helped to consolidate their understanding of the solar system.