Make your own flip books

Before you begin

• Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. Additional help to carry out your risk assessment, including examples can be found here. Don’t forget to make sure all young people and adults involved in the activity know how to take part safely.
• Make sure you’ll have enough adult helpers. You may need some parents and carers to help if you’re short on helpers

Setting up this activity

• Everyone will need to have been on some adventures to get the most out of this activity. If you’re running this in the winter, the group could think about everything they did over the summer. Newcomers could focus on drawing all of the adventures they’re looking forward to instead, or recount another activity they did outside Scouts.
• If using A4 paper, cut each sheet into eight equal squares. Each person will need about 50-100 squares to make a decent flipbook. Index cards and notepads could also be used, though these may be expensive to purchase in the volumes needed. Books of sticky notes may be a cheaper alternative and will take less time to complete.
• If the group is tech-savvy and you have the necessary equipment, you could use cameras, computers or smartphones to make a short digital animation or stop motion animation instead of a flipbook.

Animate your adventure

1. Explain that everyone will be making their own adventure flipbook. Give everyone 50-100 bits of paper, index cards, sticky notes or a notepad to illustrate. Put out writing materials, colouring pens and pencils and anything else you’ve got that might help the group decorate their flipbooks.
2. Everyone should find some space to work in. They should think about the adventurous activities they’ve taken part in and pick one they enjoyed lots or learned something useful from.

3. When they’ve settled on an activity, they should think of a personal achievement, or a skill it made them better at. They should also think about the equipment they used and list any safety measures that were in place that they can remember.

4. Come up with a cover design for the flipbook. Draw it on the first piece of paper. This should include a title and image that introduces the activity.
5. Now, outline a simple storyboard for the flipbook. Each scene needs a lot of pictures, so this needs to be as straightforward as possible. This should be referred back to while drawing to stay on track.

6. Start drawing the story.

7. Don’t colour anything in just yet, as they can use the first page they drew to trace any drawings they need for the following pages. Simply place the next page over the last one and draw over the outline of anything that needs to be copied onto the next page. When all of the outlines are drawn, colour everything in.
8. Add pages until the scene is finished, stack them in chronological order and attach a foldback clip to the left-hand side to hold the book together.

Share your stories

1. When all of the flipbooks are done, everyone should find a partner and swap flipbooks. Guess what activity the other person is doing and what skill they’re learning. Identify safety procedures and equipment used. The creator should talk through the activity, skills, safety and equipment featured in the flipbook with their respective partner.

2.  Now that everyone’s thought some more about their chosen activity, they should come up with a new goal to do with that activity. This could be to further improve their skills or to learn how to complete the activity in a different way. On a final piece of paper, they should create a back cover for their flipbook featuring the new goal.