Category: Arts & Crafts

Arts & Crafts

Larry’s TOON Institute

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If your kids are interested in animation and learing how to animate their own cartoons, here’s a great collection of beginner lessons for them from professional animator Larry Lauria.

The Toon Institute’s free animation course offers a baker’s dozen lesson on the basics of animation, including the basics of animating a bouncing ball, squashing and stretching animated objects, character and face construction, timing, how to “thumbnail” a scene, and much more. These are a lot of fun, and explain the fundamentals of animation very well.

CLICK HERE to go to the site!

Arts & Crafts, History

History Crafts

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FirstPalette.com is a free children’s craft site, with hundreds of colorful step-by-step craft projects for young students.

If you search a bit (mainly under the category “World and Culture” which we link to here), you’ll find a couple dozen neat history-oriented craft projects, including the Egyptian hieroglyphic stones, Roman helmets, Chinese art scrolls, Medieval Crowns, and many more. These would be great to do when studying different historic eras or other countries.

CLICK HERE to go to the site!

Arts & Crafts

The Mother Goose Coloring Book

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Today’s resource is this lovely collection of vintage illustrated Mother Goose rhymes, taken from various books from the late 1800s & early 1900s.

Great for coloring and for learning or re-visiting these classic childhood rhymes. Enjoy!

To download this PDF coloring book, RIGHT CLICK HERE and “save link” to your computer. Mac users, press the “control” key, then click the link and save to your mac.

Arts & Crafts

1000s of coloring pages & more

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The EduPics site has 1000s  of clip art images, coloring pages, pictures, photographs and handicrafts. Everything has been classified in themes which are commonly used in primary education. The coloring pages are especially designed to be used throughout the year at school. You can search any topic to get coloring pages, clip art, and photos for school use. Great for notebooking or lapbooking for free!

CLICK HERE to go to the site

Arts & Crafts, Physics, Science

Dragonfly Helicopters & other Science Toys

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SCIENCE TOY MAKER: Mysterious, Kinetic, Noisy, Do-It-Yourself Science Projects that Entice Scientific Investigation

We featured this site in years past, but it just keeps getting better and better as they add dozens more way cool science toys,  gadgets and gizmos (both easy & advanced)  that you can make at home to demonstrate all sorts of scientific principles. (We especially like the “dolphin ring” video and project!) Bookmark this site and refer to it whenever you want a hands-on toy building project that has scientific value & your kids will love to play with!

Click here to go to the site!

Arts & Crafts, Video

The Magic Horse

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Have you ever heard of Charlotte (Lotte) Reiniger? She was one of the foremost pioneers of hand-cut paper silhouette animation, and produced the very first full length animated feature in Germany in 1923. Her work is finely detailed and truly amazing and captivates young viewers.

The Magic Horse is a beautiful example of Reiniger’s paper silhouette animation. This short film (10 minutes) made in 1953 is a delightful adaptation of the Grimm’s Fairy Tale. Watch it below, or if the video below does not show up on your device, click here to view it on Youtube.

Arts & Crafts, Nature Studies

The Common Birds coloring book

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The Common Birds Coloring Book from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology contains terrific line drawings of over 50 common feeder birds. You can download the coloring book and print out pages as you need them, and let your students color the images using a field guide. There are also identification questions on each page to help your students learn to spot these birds in the field.

Most of the pictures in this coloring book were drawn by the noted bird artist and ornithologist, Louis Agassiz Fuertes (1872-1927). Fuertes, a native of Ithaca, New York and a Cornell University graduate, is known for his realistic bird art. Look for his signature initials: L. A. F. The other drawings are by William Montagna, signature initials: W. M. All are gorgeous!

To download the PDF coloring book, CLICK HERE

Art Appreciation, Arts & Crafts

The Art Zone

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The National Gallery of Art has a great interactive art  site called THE ART ZONE – an amazing array of art project activities for kids to create their  own works of art online.  Create portraits, animated scenes and landscape paintings in the style of American primitive artists… and much, much more! Loads of mind-boggling computer art fun here.

Download the Art Zone or NGAkids App applications to your Macintosh or Windows-based computer, or order the free CDs. There is also an iOS version of the NGAkids App for iPad. These interactives are not available for online play.

Click here to go to the site!

Arts & Crafts

Advanced Animation by Preston Blair

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If you have a student who is interested in animation, here’s a wonderful resource that they will love:

“Advanced Animation” by Preston Blair remains one the a all-time greatest cartooning books ever…and every page has been lovingly scanned and posted by the wonderful folks at AnimationResources.org

From the website:

Preston Blair was one of the finest draftsmen to have ever worked in the field of animation. He animated Mickey Mouse in “Sorcerer’s Apprentice”, and he was one of the top animators at MGM, where he animated the legendary Red Hot Riding Hood. His book, titled simply “Animation” crystalized the basic principles of cartoon animation, and profoundly influenced a whole generation of young animators. He passed away in 1995.

Preston Blair’s book “Advanced Animation” is one of the best books on the subject. It is the text Animation Resources’ drawing course is based upon. When Blair put the book together in 1947, he used the characters he had animated at Disney and MGM to illustrate the various basic principles of animation. Apparently, the rights to use some of the characters were revoked after the book was already in the stores. Publication was halted for a time, and he was forced to redraw most of the MGM characters, replacing them with generic characters of his own design. The revised edition went on to become a classic, and the first edition was forgotten.

You can go to THIS PAGE on AnimationResources.org and read more about this classic book and the online course they offer based on the book…

Or for a direct link to the PDF download itself, you can RIGHT CLICK HERE and “save link” to your computer. Mac users, press the “control” key then click the link and save file to your Mac.