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My name is Susan, and I am an online drawing application-aholic! Today I found a new one, Slimber, via MakeUseOf.com, and it is very cute. I think your kids will love it. What a shame I can't draw to save my life!
Once you go to the Slimber site, click Painter, then choose the dimensions of your art work. There are several tools and a colour palette to explore, and you can adjust brush sizes and shapes. My method was to play with each tool and colour to make a shapes picture which I oh-so-hopefully called abstract art. Once you've made your "art work", you can save it, or watch it again as a movie via the play button in the left bottom corner. It's fascinating to watch the movie of the development of a beautiful and complicated piece like the Golden Sun Over Hawaii.
Once saved, your work appears in the gallery, and there you can click on it, and get its url, or the html to embed it.
I like that there is no join up, so this is an ideal drawing editor if your kids need to make a quick digital picture of something, or to encourage their creative side under your supervision. It would be even better if it were easy to add clear text to a drawing, but you need to use the pencil for that. Writing with a mouse has never been this chook's strong suit!
If you're looking for other online art editors, you can link via my article on another drawing tool, Flockdraw.
I discovered ARKive recently, via MakeUseOf.com and I am super impressed. The main purpose of the site is to create the ultimate multimedia archive of the world's endangered animals. So important, because over 17,000 animals, plants and fungi are currently threatened with extinction, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources' Red List of Threatened Species.
The images and video are excellent quality, and available for internal educational use ie you can't publish them on your website etc, but can use them in a classroom. Such a pity, I would have loved to share one here. However, I found fascinating pictures and information about creatures presumed to be extinct like the highland slender loris, and I loved the feature where you can use geography to explore the site, or common AND scientific names. It's a work in progress, so information is still being prepared, but there is lots to see and do.
Part of ARKive, ARKive Education is an amazing resource for parents, teachers and children.
ARKive Education is a resource bank for teachers and other educators who are interested in helping children to become more aware of wildlife and conservation issues. Making use of the stunning imagery available on the main ARKive website, ARKive Education provides downloadable, ready-to-use modules on a wide range of curriculum topics, suitable for geography, biology, environmental education and citizenship lessons.
If your youngster loves animals, loves to learn about them and examine them closely, this website is the next best thing to real life. Information is clear and engaging, and is written by people who are qualified biologists. And the images are brilliant!
ARKive Education also has interactive games which encourage kids to learn about plants, animals and conservation. These are not flashy bells and whistle games but engaging nonetheless. I liked 24 hour Survival - a Day in the Life of a Sand Lizard, where you have to help a sand lizard survive 24 hours of his life. (Phew, it is so much easier being a chicken!) You'll also find Design a habitat, Copse and robbers (a detective-type game), Magnetic fridge poetry, and other puzzles and learning games. One extra feature I like in ARKive Education is for signed-up members, who can make and share their own image and video collections - great for classrooms!
Following directions in print or on video is a great activity for kids. If you know a subject that intrigues them, why not use Google to see if some kind (and articulate) person has posted directions for how to do it. The articulate part comes in because it's easier for all of us to follow clear, well-thought out directions. I wrote an article about following directions last year, called Recycle and Read, where I described Arvind Gupta's wonderful website, Toys from Trash.
Here's another example of a great site I think most children will love. It's done by a paper aeroplane enthusiast: Alex's Paper Airplanes. It has video and print directions, plus diagrams that teach you the necessary folds and cuts. There are some fairly unobtrusive Google ads, but the written directions are clear, and there's even a flying lesson to get you started. I went flying yesterday with the little helicopter! Fun Paper Airplanes is a different site with free downloadable templates for planes, which might be useful if your kids are younger.
If paper folding in general interests your children, try Wikipedia's guide to origami folds and Tammy Yee's Origami Page, or check out my article Fold Me Up, Scotty, particularly the comments where author Sandy Fussell gives a neat link on Origami and Maths.
Constructing and flying paper aeroplanes is a wonderful activity for the holidays or a wet weekend. Institute a challenge like who can invent the plane that flies highest or furthest, or land on a precise spot, or loop the loop. Offer prizes or a trophy too if you want. Kids are investigating principles of flight, and developing skills in creative and analytical thinking, hypothesizing and testing theories. It involves them in a scientific activity, but best of all it's fun! If your children want to follow up and explore more about flight, perhaps learn about gyroscopic procession and torque, try NASA's Aerospace Activities and Lessons.
If your child is particularly interested in an activity, maybe they could write clear directions for it, or create a how-to video about it. You'll find lots of video examples at Youtube.
I have fallen in love with a new children's picture book. It's Tatiara, written and illustrated by Jo Oliver, and published by New Frontier (2010).
A girl and a seal become friends
in a sheltered bay and, in time,
healing comes to each of them.
I like the way our young heroine is so matter-of-fact about her physical disability - a curved spine, for which she wears a back brace. She longs to swim with her injured seal friend, Tatiara, but she must make do with a bathtub instead. It doesn't stop her catching fish for Tatiara, even though the seal pup is perfectly capable of catching them herself.
Oliver's illustrations are created by dry-point etching coloured with vibrant watercolour washes in the colours of the sea. (New Frontier) What this means to me is each picture is evocative, rather than photorealistic. They give a very special "feel" to the book , transporting us to its setting in Tathra, on the far south coast of NSW. The illustrations in sepia tones seem to show old interior walls with water stains. You can see so much light and spray in the rolling waves of the seascape as Oliver captures the essence of ocean. And the dry-point etching enables delighful fine detail.
Setting is a real feature of Tatiara, with not just the physical features of the local area being incorporated into the story, but also historical details. The young narrator shows us glimpses of Tathra's past, when cargo was loaded from steamers onto the wharf, and whalers would come to harpoon whales.
According to the publisher's guidelines, Tatiara is suitable for children with a reading age of 4-8 years, but I urge you to consider it for older children too. I think it is a perfect acquisition for libraries, and homes that appreciate beautiful books. The story and words are simple enough for young children to share, but have an ageless quality. It's the sort of book you close with a sigh, and that stays with you for a very long time.
Learn Something Every Day is a trivia fan's dream come true. There's a quirky fact published each day, with accompanying cute cartoon-style sketch, and you can scroll through to read earlier facts.
The facts might make interesting discussion starters, or be a good focus for further reading and research in a classroom situation. Students might even decide to use a fact as a challenge eg "The greatest height a chicken egg has been dropped without cracking is 700 feet." What inventions can kids create to carry an egg safely to the ground?
I love the art work too, which is a great example of using just a few lines to communicate an idea. Some of it might offend some people, so as ever, use caution. I think children would enjoy creating their own cartoon art to illustrate a fact of their choice. For the samples here, I used a quick program called Skitch, but you could also use Photoshop, or an online art editor. Kids might enjoy looking for some interesting facts at Science Kids.
