98 Seconds on YouTube Leads to Hours of Fun and Learning

We watched this video on YouTube last night. Actually, we ended up watching it several times because the boys found it so amusing. We had some interesting discussion about cat behaviour (our Jessie cat could have starred in that video!)

I happened to mention to Nathan that he could use his lightbox (a birthday gift from several months ago) to help make some basic line drawing animation like that used in the video. The boys ended up breaking out the lightbox and spending several hours last night and this morning working on creating crazy characters with the lightbox and the drawing templates that came with it.

Noah and Nathan also did a live performance of the video last night for me! Noah was Simon and Nathan was the cat. They really nailed the whole thing, and remembered almost all of the little details. Of course Nathan totally had the cat's attitude right down, too.

Nathan is now interested in learning more about how to do line-drawing style animation so I have been spending some time tracking down appropriate resources on the internet today. So far, these look like two promising sites to get us started:

http://www.youthlearn.org/learning/activities/multimedia/animation.asp

and

http://www.randommotion.com/index.html

We will probably try our hand at making a simple thaumatrope later today. I have found a couple of good books at the library to help us get started with some basic animation as well.

It still amazes me sometimes how one simple thing can spark the boys' imagination and interest and they're just off and running with a world of new things to explore. That is truly unschooling at its finest!