Animation LEGO Club

Off the back of Jenson's successful LEGO animation production last week, this week's LEGO Club stuck with the same theme.

We're never quite sure how many people are going to turn up each week. The home ed lot are a busy bunch and that's credit to the fantastic home schooling community that exists in Gloucestershire and surrounding areas. There is a tremendous amount on offer and on Monday mornings I know a lot of families go to home ed swimming sessions at Leisure @ Cheltenham.

We get what I call our regulars and just lately it's been lovely to see some new faces too. This was the second time Oak, Bella and their Dad had come along. We also welcomed Toby and his Mum, who ironically I did a photo shoot for when Mouse About Town was just starting out! Cheltenham certainly is a small place!

Bella was first up at the animating table. Here is her film:

Next was her brother Oak who made this film:

Finally Toby, who had been waiting patiently, made this film:

It was surprising how long it took to make each film. It was a good 30 minutes by the time the children had designed and built their object to animate, set it up ready for the first frame then repositioned it for subsequent frames. Our 90 minute LEGO session went quickly.

The children all loved the experience, especially the part at the end where I pressed play and they were able to watch their film play back for the very first time! Their parents were as impressed with both Dan and Lucia making a note of the name of the animation software.

Aa we discovered last week when Jenson made his production, a significant amount of patience is involved with animating a film. There is also a great deal of skill required to imagine the moves needed in order to create the desired effect. That's not an easy task for anyone let alone a six year old.

We've started to get into a bit of a pattern on Mondays. After LEGO comes a quick lunch, sometimes at McDonalds as a treat, then straight round to the trampoline park for a home ed session. Jenson loves it and after two hours of jumping and swinging around he's more than ready for tea and bedtime.

What was really interesting today was that when we pulled into the car park at Funky Warehouse, Jenson commented on the fact there were three cars already in the car park. He said three cars plus ours makes four Mummy. Having done some work on units of ten, this natural development in his number skills was great to see.

We rounded the day off with a trip to the cinema to see the new minion film, which was just so funny!