Old-School Animation with a YouTuber Teen: Our DIY Zoetrope

I must tell you that my child has turned into one of those teenaged YouTubers. She has a channel on which she posts cartoons that she makes, usually music videos or memes.

Here's my favorite of her little skit-thingies:



Anyway, basically what I'm saying is that the kid has her animation hobby well in hand, and there is no technical instruction that I could usefully provide her on this subject.

But technical instruction is rarely my role, anyway. What I do is contextualize. Historicize. Enrich and embellish. Strew, if you will.

So on a typical Thursday afternoon, after lunch and before everyone starts getting ready for evening extracurriculars, you contextualize and historize a teen's YouTube animation hobby by talking about the earliest history of animation together, and then you make and play with a zoetrope!

I'm obsessed with everything Crash Course, so you won't be surprised that to get started, we watch the first episode of Crash Course: Film History. In it, the host talks about the zoetrope and the persistence of vision, a fun little optical trick that we've played with off and on over the years, although usually with a thaumotrope instead of a zoetrope:

To make our own zoetrope, Syd and I used a DIY zoetrope kit that I had squirreled away (for too many years to be proud of...), but it looks like to make something similar, you'd have to consult something like this book, because all the other DIY kits that I'm seeing now have too much plastic:



Like, I think that you're going to have fun with your zoetrope, but I don't think that you're going to love it so much that you're going to be glad that it's made of sturdy, keep-it-forever plastic and not nearly as sturdy, recycle-it-when-you're-done cardboard.

Anyway, the fun part, at least for Syd, isn't so much constructing the actual zoetrope. It's creating the animations!


If you can get it to rotate quickly and at a consistent speed, it works quite well!

We kept ourselves entertained with that thing for a looooooong time...

Syd and I also watched a video of this, the COOLEST ZOETROPE EVER CREATED:



I love that the 3D zoetrope represents such an intense intersection with art and hands-on craft. There's still place for old-school DIY used with tech-savvy techniques, is the take-away that I'm hoping that my little artist/tech-savvy creator took away from our project.

P.S. Here are a couple of other DIY zoetrope builds that you could utilize:

• construction paper and pie plate zoetrope
• papercraft zoetrope template

It's a Dragon Party!

Postcard invitations are now our thing. Matt designs one side of the postcard, with an awesome party graphic--

I love how Matt designed this to capture not just the party theme, but also his and Will's shared love of video games.

--and the party details, and space for the address and stamp (we didn't have time to hand-deliver invitations for this party, so I also got Matt to type in all the addresses directly onto the invitations for me--yay!), and the kids do the front sides of the postcard invitations:

Willow likes to use Google Images to research possible illustrations.

Next week is pretty much designated as Party Prep Week--we've got cardboard shields to cut out, a dragon hoard to finish painting, dragon bread to bake, the rules of Dragon Tag to finalize, and a castle cake to put together.

She's going to be nine. I can't believe it.

Hershey, Pennsylvania, to Easton, Pennsylvania

Did we hit all the kid-friendly factory-esque stops or what?!? The day after Hershey, we nuked some oatmeal, packed up the car, hopped in, and drove straight to Crayola Experience:

crosswalk between the parking garage and Crayola Experience

Admission is VERY expensive (thank goodness for coupons!), but to be fair, you do come home with bags full of stuff at the end, all included in the cost, including crayons in custom-designed wrappers--




--and markers that you can watch being made, complete with your choice of color combination:


There's a factory show during which you can watch a demonstration of crayons being made (including receiving one of the crayons at the end!), but everything else is hands-on:

You can paint with melted crayons--


--including your finger tips, if you're that brave, I suppose:

You can draw with glowing markers in a dark room:

You can make spin art with more melted crayons in a complicated (and often broken, a docent admitted to me) wax melting and paper plate spinning machine:

Figuring out how to recreate this project is a new obsession of mine.

You can paint in a sunny spot--




--and,  in case you're worried that you'll have to carry around a wet painting all day, you can send it through the dryer:

You can make various craft projects (a puzzle and a treasure box, on the day that we were there):

You can make yourself into a coloring page--




--and color it to make yourself look funny--


--or your sister:

I'm framing this picture that Sydney colored of Willow. 

I'm probably not framing this one of Sydney that Willow colored.

You can decorate sculptures with dry erase markers:

And if you've got any leftover tokens, you can exchange them for Model Magic:

I splurged on a couple of more complicated kits for the girls to put together at my friend's place later.

Thank goodness that the Crayola Experience also had tons of active, gross motor activities, too. I possibly have two of the more crafts-oriented kids on the planet, but I doubt that they could sit around for a full day doing nothing but art activities. Now, a couple of art activities, a visit to the two-storey indoor playground--

--a couple of art activities, a trip outdoors for a picnic lunch and a good climb all over the crayon statues, a couple of art activities, an art activity that also involves running around and playing with your art--

--a couple of art activities, some time messing around with some big, open-ended manipulatives--

--a couple of art activities, a while goofing around on the interactive floor--

(we stayed in this room for a LONG time, until Willow could predict the cycling of each of the different programs, and could master each one)

--a couple of final art activities, a trip to the gift shop, where Sydney bought a Tinkerbell coloring book and I bought Twistables, Model Magic, and purple bubbles, a trip to the bathroom, and a walk to the car, where I got the girls settled, made sandwiches and passed out fruit and strawberry milk and granola bars, called my friend to get his address, programmed it into the GPS, fiddled with the GPS for an excruciatingly long time until I could make it route me around New York City, discovered that I couldn't find my planner, looked for my planner, called Matt to ask if he could call our last hotels and ask about the planner, and then finally remembered that the garage had one of those walk-up kiosks to pay for your parking, which it had probably been at least twenty minutes since I had visited, and if I didn't book it they'd probably make me pay even more to get out of the place.

Next stop: New Haven, and the Yale Peabody Museum!

Cincinnati, Ohio, to Hershey, Pennsylvania

Add a day just for driving (and visiting every Welcome Center in every state we passed-we LOVE brochures!), and two days later you'll find us, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, well-rested and all swum out, at Hershey's Chocolate World:

They're Hershey's Kisses, doncha know?

 I had planned on purpose to make an early day of this, because I had some work that I needed to get done,  so this smallish attraction (surrounding a GIANT interior mall of Hershey products) was just right. Hershey has a free ride showing how their products are made, an interactive movie that costs a ton, a chocolate-tasting class that costs a ton, and a candy bar-making workshop that costs a ton. The movie sounded silly, the chocolate-tasting class sounded too dry (Willow really wanted to take it, but it had a lecture component, so I knew that Syd would just be bored), but the candy bar-making workshop sounded just right--educational, hands-on, super fun for kids--so I signed us up:

First, you use a computer program to set up your chocolate bar. You choose a base--

--and fillings--

--and whether or not you'd like sprinkles.

See my chocolate bar set-up? It was very annoying that an adult couldn't accompany a child into the workshop without paying a separate admission--not only do I not need a giant chocolate bar all my own, but I couldn't really supervise my kids or thoroughly enjoy their experiences with them because I also had to do my own stuff. I'm glad that I did pay to enter, however, since in our group there was another set of sisters, both a little older than Willow, and they were a little lost throughout the entire process, so it was worth the money to make sure my kiddos knew what was going on, at least.

If you can tell from the photo below, Syd was also VERY annoyed at having to wear a hairnet, but Will and I thought they were pretty awesome:

At the end of the workshop there's a bin where you can return your hairnets and aprons, but I made the girls give them back to me to stuff into my backpack.

After you set up your chocolate bar, you enter the factory, where you can watch your bar being created by the machines on the assembly line. It's meant to represent the real factory set-up in miniature:

You can follow your bar, because the computer knows where it is on the line and keeps it labeled.

All our candy bars--Willow's milk chocolate, Sydney's white chocolate, and my dark chocolate

covering the bar in melted milk chocolate

through the drying oven

 While you wait for your candy bar to dry and harden inside the oven, you use another computer program to design your packaging. Will had a lot of fun with this:

machines for packaging the bar--the docent said this is the only part that's different from what's used in the actual Hershey factory

our candy bars!!!

 After the workshop, we rode the factory tour ride a couple of times--

--and then sat down in the giant food court to eat our packed lunches... and of course taste our candy bars:

It has a lot to do with the fresh chocolate, probably, but our candy bars were DELICIOUS!

Sydney's bar with white chocolate, raspberry filling, and sprinkles

 I guess you haven't really done Hershey if you don't have a chocolate-y face to show for it:

After that, it was a fine afternoon for driving on to our hotel, watching cable TV (I let the girls watch National Treasure, pretending like it was useful prep work for our stop in Philadelphia next week), eating our packed microwaveable meals (I knew we'd score a hotel with a microwave SOMEWHERE!), and trying very hard to let me get my work done without losing my mind from kid chaos two inches away from me at all times (thank goodness for hotel wi-fi, headphones, and streaming Spotify).

Next stop: The Crayola Experience!