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March 20th - Filmmaking, Day 1

This month for filmmaking, I want to try an experiment and use Instagram Video's one minute limit to its fullest for some ONE MINUTE MOVIES. There's a few things I really miss about Vine - the ability to add music easily, the ability to go back over shots - but that's the kind of stuff I have to learn to adapt to, I guess.

For today's movie, I went off something Zephyr and Lyric were doing were they were trying to put little post-it notes that said "Kick Me" on one another. This is a very old trope, but serious question: how did they stick signs on unwitting victims before the (relatively recent) invention of post-it notes? Masking tape? Definitely not safety pins, right? That seems out of the question.

Anyway, here's our first ONE MINUTE MOVIE. Enjoy!

#MorningFunManifesto presents One Minute Movies! Today's film: "Kick Me" by the Sosin Brothers #filmmaking

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March 17th - Pokémon Drawing Studio

Today for Pokémon drawing studio, Zephyr suggested we play a game where we each draw a Pokémon from memory (rather than from a reference, like we normally do). I loved the idea, and wanted to see how different they turned out. Also, I wanted to see if being able to impose a time limit on the drawings could make things run quicker. The results:

Mine on top, Lyric in the middle, Zephyr on the bottom. 

Pretty impressive! It was fascinating watching their minds work a little differently. I'm something of a devotee of Betty Edwards' Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and I know that she says drawing from memory and drawing from imagination are two skills connected to drawing, but distinct and separate. I'm not sure if it utilized the left side of their brains more, but I think it was a fun new muscle for them to flex. Zephyr worked kind of small, so here's a detail of his work:

Pretty sweet Snorlax and Rowlet! I especially dig the gesture Rowlet is giving, a nice howdy.

Lyric, meanwhile, was more into color. That kid really loves to draw. He just goes at it with a real purpose.

March 16th - A Treasure Hunt about Perseus

Today we had our Perseus treasure hunt on Facebook Live!

Things we learned:

  • Zeus turned into a GOLDEN SHOWER to free Danaë, Perseus' mother, from a brass prison. That's just how Zeus do.
  • Perseus used a shield, a sword, a helmet, and winged sandals to kill Medusa.
  • We had a whole bunch of real-world practice doing math for both kids! And they were able to figure it out and do it in a pretty decent time!
  • Still some ways to go on math... lots of counting on fingers still for Zephyr, not a full knowledge of concepts like "eighty" for Lyric, and guessing at answers rather than figuring them out for both of them. I theoretically could have taken more of a backseat here and let the kids be wrong, but I wanted to keep it moving.
  • Livecasting is exciting, but challenging. Was I involved enough? Was it moving fast enough? Were the clues too obvious, or was it good there was less searching and more math? Should I be planning better shots? Full self-critique still to come.

But the kids had a great time and hopefully learned a little something.

Here's the full text of all the clues, in case you're curious:

March 15th - Mystery Elves

Yesterday's blizzard threw off the schedule a bit... we were scheduled to do Treasure Hunt today, but house rules prohibits doing a treasure hunt before having the Mystery Elves clean the house, so today I forced the kids to clean. 

Before.  

Their room wasn't in terrible shape, so I put Lyric on stuffed animal duty and Zephyr on Pokémon card duty.  

During.  

Working together (with some prodding from me), we were able to get the room clean in no time at all, once they stopped goofing around. Truly it is the goofing around that derails our cleaning efforts usually. Cleanliness may be next to godliness but it is a ways away from goofiness. 

After! 

And that left the room nice and tidy! With the boys off at school, I prepped the treasure hunt for tomorrow, which is all about the myth of Perseus! Tune in on my Facebook Live tomorrow morning at 7:30a EST if you want to check it out, but here's some prep photos I took: 

Props for the Perseus treasure hunt: Hades' helmet, Hermes' winged sandals/sneakers, Athena's shield, and Haephestus' curved blades... 

The rules for the hunt... 

What the clues look like

March 13th - Chess Puzzles

For chess puzzles today, Zephyr and Lyric said they wanted to play each other, which I thought sounded like a capital idea. I'd coach them and help them along as they played.  

Zephyr happened to be wearing white pajamas and Lyric was wearing black pajamas, so picking sides was easy.  

I wasn't playing favorites with my coaching - essentially I was showing Lyric how the knight moved and telling Zephyr when he was going to get into a bad exchange of pieces. Eventually we got to a point where I saw a checkmate was possible and helped Lyric find it.  

With the black queen cutting off the king's flight squares and the knight (who couldn't be interposed or captured) delivering check... checkmate! Lyric wins!

All in all a very successful morning activity... Lyric got to taste his first victory in chess, Zephyr got some valuable experience, and I got the satisfaction of ending a game with a nice checkmate.  

March 9th - Feats of Speed!

Today's planned piano lesson didn't happen for a host of reasons, but we managed to do a Feats of Speed before school! There was a point where I could beat Zephyr in a race running backwards while he ran forwards, but those days appear to be over. Especially when I'm holding a camera, apparently.

I got seriously winded at the end there, I was giving it my all. But look at Zephyr's face! That's pride!

March 8th - More product testing

Today was supposed to be Poetry for Prizes, and I was going to teach the boys "Hope is the thing with feathers" by Emily Dickinson in honor of International Women's Day, but we also had to test another product for MoMA and ran out of time on the poem. I'm gonna try and get it tonight, though.  

But the product we tested was pretty fun! It was more of a drawing exercise all about camouflage. We read about how animals use it in nature, how it was developed for the military, and about how artists like Andy Warhol appropriated it and used it to make cool patterns. Then the kids picked environments to make camouflage for...

Zephyr picked autumn leaves, Lyric picked the beach

...and then they used colored pencils to make their own camouflage patterns.  

Zephyr showing the eight year old focus

Lyric showing the five year old focus (two pencils at once!) 

They loved "making blobs" and filling them in. Lyric didn't quite get the abstraction of camouflage and wanted to make his picture a representative beach scene, but Zephyr seemed to get it, and they both enjoyed the drawing and coloring. 

Lyric's finished product. Note him camouflaged within the picture! 

Zephyr's finished product. Not too shabby! 

All in all, a pretty fun time! Hopefully we'll get the poem later, or so a little thing with feathers told me. 

EDIT: Got the poetry for prizes in!

March 7th - The Ministry of Silly Walks

Sometimes you just want to give the kids a concentrated opportunity to be silly. And so, in tribute to Monty Python's Flying Circus, we present The Ministry of Silly Walks.  

The Ministry of Silly Walks #morningfunmanifesto

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Boy oh boy do I need to get an iPhone holder to put on a tripod! That's gonna be a game changer.

March 6th - Charizard Charades

As you might have gathered, my kids are currently crazy for Pokémon. ​I can go there: I see it as a triumph of kawaii design, and with Pokémon Go informing their ideas of Mixed Reality I figure that it might be one of these areas of knowledge that will be important to them in the future and inscrutable to olds like us. So I try to bridge the gap by playing Pokémon-themed charades as a morning activity every so often. 

Zephyr does Meowth's Fury Swipes

Meowth doing fury swipes

Whereas charades is often a communication exercise (using "sounds like", breaking things down into syllables, cycling through letters, etc.), Charizard charades tends to be more of an acting exercise for the kids, as they really try to inhabit the roles of random Pokémon. 

Or at least that's what I tell myself.  

Charizard Char-ades #morningfunmanifesto #pokemon

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March 2nd - Product testing

For today's morning activity, we postponed the live veggie challenge we had scheduled to do some product testing for MoMA. The product: a card game about Odilon Redon. 

We started by reading a bit about Odilon Redon and how he drew from nature: 

 

Zephyr read to Lyric  

The instructions told us to look closely at the picture, but it was pretty small and hard to make out the details within it. The kids said they saw branches and leaves, but I pushed them to notice it was made with pencil and all in one color. 

Lyric looks closely at the picture

Then we broke out the cards and I had them look through to identify the kinds of bark Redon drew. To my surprise, they picked up the differences in the bark drawings fairly quickly. So we played a matching game with the cards

They took turns finding matches

For essentially one color abstract patterns, I found it kind of impressive how easily they spotted differences

We didn't get a chance to play concentration with the cards, but I think the kids got an introduction to various trees and the work of Odilon Redon, which isn't bad for a Thursday morning.  

March 1st - Teddy Bear School

There was a request this morning to switch up the scheduled Ministry of Silly Walks with Teddy Bear School, using stuffed Pokémon for "Pokémon Pre-K". And we tried doing it live!

Experimenting here... click the pic to watch the live video

Here's the link. Still trying to figure out how to embed live videos more intuitively on Squarespace.

Things we learned: Sylveon's favorite food is jellybeans, and Igglybuff's favorite food is dust (fairy dust). In Library class they get a book read to them and then get to take out a book for two weeks. When you go to the principal's office you have a little chat and then you get a time out. Just seeing the process of school from people going to school makes Teddy Bear School an interesting activity to run.