All grown up.  She lost her first tooth on Mother’s Day.  She was doing a puzzle when she turns around to me with her hand out and her lips all bloody and her eyes wide with shock.

“Mom! My tooth fell out!”

Yes it most certainly did.  You have now joined the ranks of the rest of the 1st graders who have jack-o-lantern smiles.  My big girl is growing up.

After the tooth fairy visited last night (and left behind a bunch of fairy dust all over the bed), she informed me that she is so excited about school pictures NEXT FALL because she will have a whole lot more teeth missing.

I’ll just be happy when all of her teeth stop wiggling at the same time. She has 4 more that are about to join their fallen comrade in the next month or so.

I can’t wait for those pictures!

This one is called “The Big Hip Hop: Turn Up the Cheese.”  I went over to The Big Picture for this image of a little girl in an angel costume standing in a cathedral. This image is a bit “sweet” for DS106, so I tried a couple variants.

In the first, I used lyrics from Christina Perri’s “A Thousand Years.” I liked how it kept the  theme of Easter.  I experimented with fonts and decided on the much overused “comic sans.”  Nice, but not really pushing any boundaries. This one feels beautiful without much effort, lazy even.

Then I mixed it with a Coldplay song, “Viva la Vida.”

A touch of teenage angst font and still, I’m getting a nice message.  I just can’t seem to cheese this up.  The little girl is just too sweet.

Ok, one more try.

Had to dig into the way back machine for a song by Real Life called, “Send Me an Angel” from the year 1983.  (For those of you who weren’t around then, here’s a link)

I love the teenage angst font with the lyrics for this one.  So demanding, it really has a DS106 feel to it.

I have no idea what assignment this was, because I closed it, so there will be no tags until someone figures out which mashup this is.

When I think of a journey, I think of putting on some good walking shoes and putting one foot in front of another, so here’s a shoe print with an icon of a heart and an arrow to point the way.

A very simple image, but I had to learn how to do a text arc.  You really can learn how to do anything online.  I’m not really sure why we need teachers anymore.  Oh wait…  because kids would have no idea how to do a search.

Which reminds me, I heard an interesting story on NPR this morning that Encyclopedia Brittanica will officially no longer print encyclopedias.  So I guess if you have a set lying around somewhere, you should hang on to them for a while, they might be worth some shiny pennies one day.

And a spare poem thrown in for fun.

The assignment for this page was to find text that they liked and blackout the rest.  They were trying to create a free form poem, without worrying too much about making sentences.  I encouraged them to use images either by drawing them, or by including them (not blacking them out) on their page.

The students liked this page in particular because it was creative without being too taxing.

If you are in the area next week, the kids have a show at the Box Factory.  You can come and check out their books along with a bunch of other great art.

The rules are simple.  Get a knit square (or rectangle, or circle, or tetrahedron) and embroider DS106 4life on it.  Next, take your square and sew, tie, zip tie, or otherwise attach it to an object in public.  Last, take a picture of your Yarn Bombing. Post them to flickr with the tag ds106yarn.

Want to participate?  Post a comment here and I’ll send you your very own DS106 4life yarn square.  The only requirement is that you have a mailing address and you must promise to actually put it up in a public space and photograph it.

If you have your own yarn squares and you wish to do this: cool! I can’t wait to see what you come up with!

That last one was mine. Want to see it?

This was inspired by the Daily Create project for today. The original idea was to record something cooking.  Since I was already doing the flip books, I thought I’d animate something cooking.

A quick lesson in creating a flip book: cut some heavy drawing paper to a nice neat size (ours are 4.5×3 inches) and staple about 20 of them together at the top.  Starting at the last page, draw a simple image.  Lay the next page down over the top and redraw your image slightly differently. You’ll be able to see through the paper just enough to figure out where your next image should be.  Repeat until your images go where you want them to be on the last page.  Hold at the top (staple side) and flip!

Helpful hints: Don’t draw anything more than halfway up the page.  You won’t see it when you flip the pages.  If you are unsure of where to start, draw a bouncing ball.  Move it a little, or move it a lot.  Small movements will be a slower speed and larger movements will show a faster bouncing ball.  Keep it simple! Detailed drawings will be hard to recreate.  Stick people are welcome!

And the most important tip: When stapling the pages, make sure that one edge of your paper all lines up.  Staple the OTHER edge.  This will make it much easier to flip.

Happy flipping!

*A special thanks to Nathan who did the filming for me so I could use both hands to flip the pages. You rock!

Found an image of Jim on the internets (wow are there a lot of Jim Groom images out there!) and then used the little tablet to draw him as a cartoon.

voila!

For those of you who are family member who are looking for photos of the kids, I’m sorry. I’ve got nothin’. I’m currently immersed in this crazy online class called DS106 and I’m not even getting credit for it.  However, I’ve convinced some important people that this could possibly be used as Professional Development.

I will attempt to put pictures of the kids here again very soon. Until then, you can look at Jim, the guy who leads us on this wacky adventure in digital storytelling.

This is one of my favorite crazy songs from the 80s.  This DS106 assignment called for the creation of a simple image for a song title. This one is fairly obvious, but still a little fun.

I imported the lobster and guitar to fireworks.  I used the magic tool to select the guitar and inserted it to the lobster image.  I then selected small portions of the guitar and cut them out to make it appear to be held by the lobster. TA DA! simple.

Lobster image courtesy of this website, guitar here.

This isn’t a DS106 assignment, but it totally should be. Cartoon You!

I’ve been drawing Ben as a cartoon for a few years now, but it’s so much better with the tablet.  He looks all professional and digital now.  If he’s really cool, he’ll use it as one of his avatars somewhere online.  That would totally make my day.

Dancing sounds like fun!

If we don’t end up going, we’ll probably still be working on DS106 assignments.

Photo credits: Firefly Cove, 1963 stamp
Inspiration page: chaiPhoto
All work completed in Fireworks.