Learning & Development: Film - Baboon on the Moon

Many of our nursery and Foundation Stage children are fascinated by outer space. They've chatted about it in our regular group planning sessions, and some have brought in moon figures, which we have incorporated into their play.

It was through this that I recalled 'Baboon on the Moon', a short animation that I'd been introduced to on a British Film Institute training course. The children are familiar with the medium of film from watching at home, so I thought it would be interesting to use the animation to tie in with the children's interests and also develop other themes by looking at the relationship between sound and image. It would also be a good opportunity to develop language skills.

Sound and image

The six-minute animation follows the plight of a baboon abandoned on the moon. It's his job to top up the moonshine every day. After his maintenance duties are completed, he plays his trumpet and dreams of being back home.

We first listened to 'Baboon on the Moon' without the picture and then discussed what we'd heard, what emotions the sound and music provoked and what the children thought the film could be about. Sounds that we heard included an alarm clock, a radio, a spoon stirring a cup, and a strange machine sound. This discussion generated lots of words, including 'scary' and 'cranking'. Some of the children did actually guess that the animation was about space, because they thought that the music sounded 'spooky'.

We then watched it with the picture and sound together. We recalled the words we'd generated and talked about how they also described what we'd seen. This started the children understanding character and narrative - what the story is about. They were awash with descriptive words and phrases to describe what they'd seen, such as that the baboon seemed 'extremely unhappy'. Other words inspired by the space theme included 'quiet', 'no air', 'alien', 'rocket', 'craters', 'moon', 'stars' and 'planets'. The children incorporated these into their own narratives of the film.

Our school specialises in ICT and uses it throughout the curriculum, so while some of the older children wrote their own stories, others recorded their narratives orally on MP3 players.

We evaluated what we had done as a group and picked the bits that we liked best from everybody's stories. We selected different sentences and ideas and combined them into a story which we made into a podcast.

On listening to the podcast we decided that, while the story was very good, it did not generate the same emotions as the film. We decided that adding music would help convey more of a feeling of sadness.

The children listened to different types of music to work out which ones can make us feel sad - rock music was dismissed, for example. Then we all composed atmospheric music on GarageBand, a computer program that enables you to record, edit and mix music. Again, we evaluated our compositions and mixed two of the pieces together to create the right mood for our podcast.

Missing home

I was amazed by how much empathy the children developed for the baboon character. The animation ends with him looking down on Earth, which is getting further and further away, and he cries. This made the children decide that he is lonely and misses home. They worked out that he was from Earth because the film includes items that they recognised, such as a pack of cornflakes and a radio. They decided that they wanted to rescue the baboon and return him home.

Some of the children designed rescue rockets. They constructed them in the technology area out of cardboard tubes, boxes and paper. We took the creations outside to see if they would 'take off'. Of course, that wasn't successful, so we discussed what would be needed to launch them, and that they needed fire to make them blast off.

One child was interested in space and knew that astronauts wear helmets because there is no oxygen. He was curious about the different gasses in space, so we used the internet to investigate. Other children expressed an interest in the moon and sun and what happens when the sun goes down and the moon rises. We looked into this, and also at planets.

The planet discussions led the children on to lively conversations about aliens, so we read Here Come the Aliens! by Colin McNaughton. We designed our own aliens and made up alien gobbledegook languages.

The children also returned to the 'Baboon in the Moon' by turning the home corner into the baboon's home. They role-played him getting up in the morning and going out to work. Some of the Foundation Stage children also wrote letters home to Earth asking for someone to come and rescue him.

The letters, rockets and describing words were used to make a wall display of the children's work.

In celebration

The project lasted more than four weeks. It could have continued even longer, but unfortunately it was interrupted by half-term.

It captured the children's interests so much that they talked about it at home with their parents. We put the podcast on to CDs so that the children could listen to it outside of school. We also put it on the internet. Some parents without internet access took their children to the local library to listen to it, which was great.

We have a celebratory assembly at the end of each term, so there we also shared our work with the other schoolchildren and parents.

Lynn Scott spoke to Annette Rawstrone

Further information:

'Starting Stories: A film and literacy resource for three- to seven-year-olds' (British Film Institute, £39.95, 01256 302866, www.bfi.org.uk) - source of 'Baboon on the Moon.