Yesterday I had my two little girls, Sabra and Cheyenne. I decided to give them a breather from the comic strip, and had thought up a project. They had to make some snowflakes at the Flash site snowflakes.lookandfeel.com, then save them, open them in Photoshop, create duplicate layer, get rid of the writing and the white background, and experiment with styles. Then make a letter-size card page, divide with guides, and make a background in the right quadrant. Add the snowflakes, resize them so they aren't all the same, add painted snowflakes if desired, add text on the outside, inside, and back. Sabra was really motivated to get it going, but Cheyenne poked about enjoying the Flash program and cutting her snowflake with the tiniest and strangest cuts imaginable. Sabra was bolder and did some experimenting. Cheyenne has her snowflake in Photoshop now, but Sabra printed a test card out and just needs to make a few adjustments next week. It's all good. Maybe I'll just pop over to snowflakes.lookandfeel. and make something to illustrate this post. See you in a minute.

Just a little project to get them using - joyously - the tools in Photoshop. They are only about 10, anyway. Sabra did well to get her project printable in 45 minutes.

Then I went next door for the virtual world class. Things went VERY well, I thought, as I could explain things to the children. I sat by Milan and Cheyenne, and Milan was da man. He "got" the idea of changing things, building, moving, etc. Cheyenne did well, too. Scott apparently thinks his valley is just a little part of his valley as he has it chock full in that wee area. There is a bad, old, futile, incredibly sucky comp in their room that has WINDOWS 95 and doesn't function except to chat. Well, you can do s-ooo-m-e t-h-i-n-g-s bbbuuuuuuuuuuuuut t-h-e-y aaaarrrrrreeeeee sssssssssssssllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllloooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwww. Windows 95. Gak. I couldn't even stand Windows 98 in 1998, let alone 95 in 2005. Is there ANY excuse to have such an old piece of crap technology? It isn't teaching them anything useful.