“Normal reading” out of a textbook isn’t always the best way to learn about a topic, J’Anna Campbell said.
That’s why the recent unit in her social studies class was so appealing, and why the Poughkeepsie City School District will be expanding the program next month.
J’Anna was among more than 100 students across Christopher King’s five Poughkeepsie Middle School social studies classes to take part in an animation program administered by The Art Effect as part of the Poughkeepsie Public Library District’s Big Read.
Each year since 2014, with the exception of two years missed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, The Art Effect instructors have entered the school and helped students take existing text and create animations to better understand what they had read. As this year’s Big Read theme was “Eve of Revolution,” with books covering the Revolutionary War era, the PMS students this year read sections of “Alexander Hamilton,” the graphic novelization of the Founding Father’s life.
Campbell said anytime technology is incorporated into a lesson, she sees students perk up.
“Using our iPads and animating our thoughts, what we think, helps a lot and it sticks in your mind,” she said. Her project partner, Heaven Murphy, added, “We usually use technology out of school. When we can bring the out-of-school into school and use it on hands-on learning, it’s going to be a lot more fun and make us more excited to do it.”
Mary Ellen Iatropoulos, director of special projects for The Art Effect, said the goal is not for technology to replace textbooks but to incorporate both as tools and teach students how to use technology most effectively to complement written text.
“This is part of the library district’s push for multimedia literacy, to engage learners of all levels,” she said. “We are very lucky that we have been able to partner with the library district and the school district to come in and offer this on a yearly basis through the Big Read program.”
The district and library each year hold several events to encourage literacy as part of the Big Read.  On Nov. 5, author Laurie Halse Anderson visited Clinton Elementary to discuss her Revolutionary War books and the writing process.
King, prior to The Art Effect programming beginning, spent time in class reading sections of the Hamilton graphic novel and analyzing the story. For his ENL students, he copied some pages of the book and inserted translations. King decided to focus on the first section of his life as a natural entry point for the students. “Because they’re familiar with the musical, I was able to take the opening number and correlate it to the part of the book I chose for them to focus on,” he said. 
Working in small groups with The Art Effect, they chose a scene from the book, filled out a pre-production worksheet in which they decided on the different shot types and visuals they may want, redrew frames and animated it. The final products included voice-overs and sound effects. “They had to take their plan and turn it into a reality,” King said. “They were given free rein, creatively, if they wanted to take it to another level.”
The students worked most days in the auditorium, which gave them space to spread out and find quiet areas to do sound work. “Plus, it puts them in a different mindset than a traditional classroom,” King said.
The Art Effect planned to compile each class’ reel of animations and return it to King for all the students to enjoy. The students used a free animation program called “FlipaClip,” and the instructors, two of whom were Poughkeepsie High School alums, walked them through how to best use its tools. J’Anna said she was surprised at how easy it was to pick up and learn to use.
“I feel like I’ve learned Hamilton’s hardships and what he had to go through before he could be popular and everyone knowing his name,” she said of the unit, adding, “I’ve learned I can go on my iPad and actually sketch something out.”
Heaven said the program was already on her phone, but said she learned she could do things with it she didn’t do before. “Since they showed me step-by-step it really helped me learn more about the platform and how I could use it more often,” she said. “I was more invested in Alexander Hamilton’s life because we were going to make an animation about it.”
While this is the 10th year in which The Art Effect has come into the school for the Big Read, this school year it will expand to include more students. The district is working directly with The Art Effect to come back in January and provide the training to other seventh grade classes.
“The Art Effect’s goal is to partner with the school district to be able to expand access to these kinds of technology opportunities as much as possible,” Iatropoulos said. “Our eventual goal is that we can establish a seventh grade unit, where it becomes an expected part that seventh grade social studies classes will get to do an animation unit and embed that unit into the overall curriculum.”