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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. 

Happy Secret New Year!

Back in it! Again. For real this time.

So here's a secret: March 1st is actually supposed to be New Year's Day. You see, when the early Romans came up with the calendar, there was only ten months, and what's now January and February were known as the intercalens, or "time between years". That's why those later months don't go along with their own names (like how October is the tenth month instead of the eighth month). Indeed, "March" refers to Mars (Martius) and was supposed to be the beginning of both the farming and the military season.

In my experience, very little seems to get done in January and February, and things that are supposed to happen in the new year don't happen until March anyway. So I'm starting to think that March 1st might be a better time to start those resolutions. And thus, I hereby dub MARCH 1ST AS "SECRET NEW YEARS", and once again commit myself to the campaign of the #MorningFunManifesto.

The Facebook Live stuff hasn't been working so great, admittedly, but I want to try more of itbecause 1) the kids like it, 2) I want to get better at it, and 3) I want to use it as a trying ground for new ideas about livecasting. Like, I want to see if consistency and keeping it to 5 minutes long help. Eventually it might be a daily thing, but I'll probably have to work up to that. Anyway, the blue dates should be Facebook Live shows, tune in if you like seeing experimental stuff.

Motor up and revvin' for the Twenty One Seven

Hello again! Back in it, and the resolution for this year is...

Discipline makes things easier
Organize your life
Discipline / Practice Makes Perfect
Discipline / Health is Wealth
Discipline / All things in moderation
Discipline / Plan your work, work your plan

So like Dead Prez said, trying to do more DISCIPLINED JOURNALING in 2017, and this blog should be part of it. I might not be posting every day, but I will be trying to put out stuff on social platforms using the #MorningFunManifesto hashtag, and collecting the best stuff (or stuff I feel needs more explanation) here.

Note: dates in dark blue in the calendar should be Facebook Live events. The kids are into that.

Join us, won't you?

Explaining the long hiatus

Been a while, right? 

Sorry everyone.  

Well, it's been another long hiatus from blogging. A few explanations for this: 

1) I've been doing a few livecasts here and there on Facebook and Instagram using the #MorningFunManifesto hashtag  

2) the kids have really started playing with each other in the mornings, and I kind of don't want to get in the middle of that

3) I'm a lazy lazy man and blogging while you have a job is difficult  

I have a plan to do a month of Pokémon themed yoga soon, which I'll announce when it happens. But I just wanted to throw up a note to say, yes, I'm feeling very guilty about ignoring this blog for so long. 

September 19 - Detective training

The kids were looking for Ragamorf this morning, so I saw an opening to do something fun for detective training. Ragamorf is a stuffed animal designed by Takashi Murakami - no idea where the name "Ragamorf" came from, I thought at first it might be based on the scientific term for rabbits (Lagomorpha) but I don't think the kids were ever exposed to that term. Anyway.  We searched together to find her, looking for clues and interviewing other stuffed animals to see if they knew her (him? its?) whereabouts. We finally found her in a bin. 

After the kids had breakfast I subtly grabbed Ragamorf and hid her in one of my display cases. Then I wrote out a few little notes in the form of clues leading to one another and hid them around the house. They actually found the second one before the first one (which said "RAGAMORF IS MISSING") and started trying to decipher the clues. The second clue led them to a pigeon shaped pillow, who when questioned (like a stool pigeon) led them to a clue that simply said "LOOK UP". After a few minutes of looking at the ceiling, Lyric finally looked down a bit and saw Ragamorf. 

Hiding in plain sight

SELFGRADE: A-. I liked how organic it felt. 

September 16 - Feats of strength

It felt like a while since we last did Feats of Strength, where I have the boys lift heavy(ish) items while I chant "FEATS OF STRENGTH! FEATS OF STRENGTH!". So I had Zephyr try to do a squat press on one of our dining room chairs.  

I tried getting Lyric to do it, but no dice. But then Zephyr decided he wanted to try and pick up Lyric and see how far he could carry him around! Take it away, tiny Hercules! 

I totally blew it by having Lyric face Zephyr instead of facing out, I really want to see his face when he's being carried. But oh well, next time.  

SELFGRADE: B. Not bad for something thrown together, I guess.  

September 13 & 14 - Pokèmon Hunt /Mystery Elves

So for Superhero Adventure, what we normally do is play pretend as superheroes together. This time, due to the Pokemadness that has descended upon our house, I had said it would be a Pokemon adventure. But I had a plan to try and get the kids to subtly learn about cleaning up their toys. 

Lyric, modeling the pokebelt

The kids had gotten Pokebelts on Lyric's birthday last week, so we strapped them on and started hunting through the house for loose Pokèmon figures and cards.  My plan was to show them how we could thoroughly look through a bin or a box, empty out all the contents (and subtly separate out the junk while doing so), and then IMMEDIATELY put it all back and leave it clean. Every so often we'd find a Pokèmon figure and I'd tell the kids to throw it in their pokeballs. 

Zephyr goes to capture a Torchick in a pokeball

Did it work? We got through a few bins on the first day and a few more bins the following day. I know FOR A FACT there are still rogue Pokèmon floating around in the house somewhere, though. I guess the house got a little more clean and I modeled some neat behavior for them, that was good. 

But what I neglected to do until the very end was commit to engaging in imaginative play with them. They kept asking me when Team Rocket was going to get there to battle. I tried a bit at the end of the second day to indulge them, but cleaning had kind of triggered my compulsiveness and I don't feel like I gave it my full effort. I still think the general concept was sound, just next time I should devote a certain amount of time to just playing with the kids. 

SELFGRADE: B. Good concept, definitely room to improve.  

September 9 - Comic book drawing studio

We're refinishing our dining room table, so we did some drawing on the floor and a lamp table this morning.  

Zephyr was working on a comic while Lyric was drawing his own Pokèmon  

I helped Lyric a bit drawing the basic shapes for a Pikachu and a Jigglypuff, but then he essentially took over. 

Not too shabby! 

Meanwhile Zephyr was going all out on his own awesome Z-me comic. I took a video of him explaining what he was working on: 

Zephyr takes us through the Z-Me comic he's working on for comic book drawing studio #MorningFunManifesto

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