Daniel's First Unguided Stop-Shot Animation.

Daniel has had tones of practice with the camera since he was about three!  Over a year ago, I'd shown him how you could take shots of an object each time moving it very slightly and then by switching through the shots quickly, the object appears to move on it's own.  Explaining that this was the basis on animation.  I reinforced the idea with flick books, bought, and made, a simple vine or snake growing on the corner of a page.  We tried this stop-shot animation with string across a table, and a plastercine model.  The concept of keeping the camera in one place was tricky for him then.  But this fall, I found the dress-maker's doll with movable joints and stand, and realised it would help with this kind of animation.  I did one example, photos here, with Daniel.

 Then, left to his own devices, Daniel created Man Meets Snake and Dies.

Unstructured, Unscheduled, Time to just be....

One thing I'm learning to cherish more and more these days is the time Daniel has at our house to be with himself, to dream and create.  He really seems to need this quiet time, and tends to either dance - his multi-faceted dance, drama, stunt creations, build imaginary worlds with characters and complex scenes, nowadays mostly filled with battles inspired by Star Wars, Bionicles, Transformers,or simply build, create and draw.


Daniel spends half his time with me and the other half with is father.  His week is very over-scheduled.  He has two short nights with his dad, that are either filled with extra-curricular classes, and it seems, quite a lot of TV, TV in the morning over there most days, then off to Montessori pre-school (his dad's choosing, not mine) for 2.5 mornings a week, then back to our place, where his needs and drives are somewhat restricted by the other children in my care - though he's getting better at asking for alone time or mummy time.I believe he benefits immensely from the calm, quiet time, he gets evenings and some weekends with me. 

These photos show a complex creation put together with materials that were just lying around, a maze with an entrance, a trap, and a statue in the middle.  We'd been reading about Theseus and the Minator.  After dinner, Daniel wanted to enact an adventure play with me where two characters who had helper robots had to find their way through the maze.  It turned out they'd been tricked by their so-called helpers, who were in fact their enemies and had trapped them.  Daniel suggested we trick them too, and try to lure them to prison by telling them we'd buy them some toys and introduce them to new friends.  Mind you, he reassured me, this special prison was not a place to simply jail them, there they'd learn about what they'd done wrong, and perhaps could be helped to be better robots.  I wondered what he could be processing though this story line...I marvel at how imaginative play is so essential to allow a child to process the realities of their life! 

Learning Styles?

I'm trying to get a better idea of how Daniel learns best in hopes of engaging his dad in a discussion about which educational path will most benefit our son.  He has refused to discuss home learning as an option, but I'm still hoping that there may be room for guiding the type of schooling Daniel gets.  There are three learnign styles i know of, perhpas more???  Auditory, visual and kinesthetic.   Daniel seems to use all three!  I'm wondering if you can tell at his age, now five, which one is strongest?  Does it even matter?  He loves to build, invent, move, dance, do sports, do science experiments, he loves to listen to stories, and recount his own and those of movies, or explain the steps he took to create or problem solve.  He is extremely visual and has amazing spacial cognition, draws endlessly, imagines incredibly, has deep inner world......

Mess and Creative Genius

"In the early 1950's, in a kitchen a mother stands opening cans and emptying the contents into a pressure cooker.  Her son, a Boy scout, wants to get a merit badge in film-making.  His father had bought him a super-8 movie camera.  Then the child got the inspiration to make a horrow movie.  For one shot he needs red, bloody-looking goop to ooze from kitchen cabinets.  So his mother buys thirty cans of cherries and dumps the cherries into the pressure cooker, rendering a delightful oozy red goop.
     His mother is not the type who says "Go outside and play.  I don't want that stuff in the house."  She is more than obliging and gives him free rein of the house, letting him convert it into his film studio - moving furniture around, putting backdrops over things.  She helps him make costumes and even acts in his films.  When he wants a desert scene, she drives him out to the desert in their jeep.
     The goopy bloody kitchen scene, she recalled much later, left her picking cherries out of the cupboard for years.  Her son's name?  Steven Spielberg."
     What if Steven's mother never let him mess up the house?  What if she hadn't let him use her things as props or didn't take him to locations for shooting his movies?  Would Steven Spielberg have become one of the world's most famous filmmakers?  While you hopefully don't have to put cherries into a pressure cooker, what hidden talents and passions does your child have that are just waiting for your support and encouragement?  Find out.

Copied from: Finding Your Child's Special Genius, Homeschooling for Success, by R.Kochenderfer and E.Kanna, (Warner Books, 2002), Steven's story quoted form The Creative Spirit, by D.Goleman, P.Kaufman, and M. Ray (Penguin Group, 1992)

Daniel will build out of anything! Even Tampons!

All old stuff -not a real blog

For anyone who may be checking my new blog out, please note that I'll be showcasing lots of pictures and fun from the past.  I guess it's not really a  blog, oh well, I'll try to include new too!

Pickle Man - tri-pod

Daniel builds a pickle man and reviews how three legs work for standing. We build a typee stand with little sticks, something we hadn't done in ages.  Interesting now, for me to realise he is much more interested in why it works compared to a year ago.  We talked about why you need a minimum of three legs or points for a stable structure.  he asked why humans could stand with only two legs.  We talked a little about our centre of gravity, balance, and how the body is made to move.

Two Hours Building

While cooking not long ago, completely oblivious to what was happening, Daniel was busy using the wooden blocks he hadn't used in over a year to build an obstacle course, replete with ramps, steps and a bridge for a tiny toy skateboard.  It went on after dinner, perhaps over two hours of meticulous work, cutting small bits of scotch tape and working out how to fit together the square, rectangular and triangular blocks to make larger, sturdier structures.  I was amazed.  When I commented on Daniel's concentration and problem solving skills, he said, off-handedly, "Well if Evan," (our upstairs neighbour, 9)  "can do it, so can I."  Evan  had made ramps out of card board.

I'm just starting, oooh so many pictures...and so much to say!

I really want to have tones of pictures here, so far, they have been my main way of documenting, I'm not sure it it will work....starting with this fall up to the holiday season