The Oxford Owl website, curated by Oxford University Press, is a wonderful learning resource for parents and caregivers with children at home. The site offers support in writing, vocabulary, phonics, reading, a bookshop, and activities.

Their website menu is divided into age groups meant to help parents choose age-appropriate books for their little ones. Using Oxford Owl levels, I designed four handy 5×7 cards that can be used by parents, teachers, instructional designers, as well as, artist and illustrators to help remember the primary area of focus in reading for each age group.

Finley the Frog, written and narrated by Shanna Sissell, was my first time attempting to illustrate and animate a level 2 children’s book.

Research suggest there are multiple benefits of using motion in animated storybooks for children, which offers a compelling reason to continue to explore children’s animation. In fact, as long as illustrations match the story, story animation may promote dual-coding, the use of visual and verbal to helps students understand the information better (https://www.learningscientists.org/blog/2019/6/6-1).

The article, Benefits of Motion in Animated Storybooks for Children’s Visual Attention and Story Comprehension. An Eye-Tracking Study suggest, “important practical implications for designers and developers of electronic storybooks and for caretakers and teachers navigating on the market of children’s electronic storybooks. Animations and motion seem to be a powerful tool to guide children’s visual attention to particular details that are meaningful from the story’s point of view. It seems most plausible that well-designed animations will focus children’s attention on the parts of the illustrations that depict the text of the story thus facilitating the integration of verbal information in the story and the non-verbal stimuli of animation and children’s story comprehension. Consequently, high-quality electronic storybooks will utilize the benefits of animations and other multimedia features creating congruency between the story text and the technological elements like animations. By thus guiding children’s visual attention (visual scaffolding) multimedia books may reinforce the beneficial effects of storybook reading.”

They continue to emphasize, “designers of storybook apps it is also important to realize that motion in pictures is helpful when the animation indeed depicts the language of the narration. We hypothesize that animation that have only decorative purposes as we often see in storybook apps may not add to children’s story comprehension and might even interfere with learning.”

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Author & Narrator: Shanna Sissell

Font: kg_miss_kindergarten

Text Animation: Smooth Bouncy Text Animation

Nature-sounds-morning-in-the-village-3d-sound

https://orangefreesounds.com/nature-sounds-morning-in-the-village-3d-sound

Small-water-splash-sound-effect

https://orangefreesounds.com/small-water-splash-sound-effect